


A Long, Lonely Time

by asktheravens



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ghosts, Gothic, Horror, M/M, Mystery, Past Character Death, Suicide, everyone who dies is dead at the start of the story, suicide as a theme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 01:23:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 58,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16822327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asktheravens/pseuds/asktheravens
Summary: Steve returned from the war injured in body and mind- and able to see the dead. At loose ends and desperate to get out of New York City, he accepts a fellowship through the Stark Foundation and retreats to a quiet lake house on the grounds of the Stark Mansion. He's supposed to be there to paint, but he quickly realizes that the house is more than he bargained for. Anthony Stark died here a decade ago, but was it an accident? A suicide? Or a murder? Obadiah Stane still lives in the main house just up the hill, and the past casts a long shadow.When Tony's ghost begins appearing to him, Steve becomes more entwined in the dangerous mystery surrounding his death. Even worse, he finds himself falling for a man who died a decade ago...Features lots of ghosts, murder, secrets, and supernatural revenge. Also Thor and Rhodey.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nostalgicatsea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/gifts).



> Thank you so much to the lovely TIshawish for the beautiful artwork! You were a great partner! Check out her amazing artwork here:  
> https://archiveofourown.org/collections/2018_Cap_Ironman_Big_Bang/works/16812571
> 
> Thank you is never enough for my dear friend onemuseleft, who provides endlessly patient beta reading and cheerleading. There's still stuff that's wrong in here. It's not her fault.
> 
> This piece goes out to nostalgicatsea, who asked for it and waited ever so patiently for it to see the light of day. Thank you for the idea, and sorry about the wait.
> 
> WARNING: (Spoilers) There are several characters who die in the story, but they all take place before it begins. It talks about suicide throughout and is overall dark, if that bothers you, but it doesn't have a bleak ending.

Bucky’s torn and mangled ghost was waiting for him on the platform at the Mount Olive Amtrak station. Steve wasn’t surprised he hadn’t left his friend behind in Brooklyn. He hadn’t been able to leave him in Afghanistan, either. 

Steve put his duffel over one arm and his shiny new cane in the other and he looked at the ground as he walked out. He scanned the scuffed brown tile of the small station until he spotted the tell-tale shoes, polished to a high gloss, and raised his eyes to take in Colonel Rhodes. The colonel grinned at him, much different in his civilian clothes but still with that military air of precision. Bucky stood behind his left shoulder. Spectral blood dripped from the ruined stump of his arm but never hit the ground. Steve sucked in a breath, but he was almost used to seeing Bucky now. He looked as he had the last time Steve had seen him outside of Kabul, except his ghost could stand and had both of its eyes, the better to stare at Steve in silent accusation. He blinked a few times, rapidly, and Bucky vanished, but Steve remained on guard. He’d come to think of his friend’s appearances as warnings, though he had not, of course, mentioned him to the VA psychiatrists. They already thought he sensed danger where no sane man would, and he couldn’t think what would be a threat in a small town in upstate New York.

The train left the station and he didn’t quite jump, or throw himself to the ground, or any of the other responses he’d been fighting since he got back, but he could tell from the colonel’s eyes he had jerked or startled enough for him to see. All of his reluctance to do this came flooding back and Steve suddenly found he didn’t want to cross the few steps to begin this whole thing, even if he’d never been able to put into words why it made him apprehensive. He knew almost anyone would kill for an opportunity like this one and he should be grateful. There was nothing for him in Brooklyn anymore, as he had found out. He saw Bucky everywhere, even when his ghost stayed away, and the constant noise and movement of the city meant he could never rest and could hardly leave his apartment even after weeks of therapy.

They shook hands and made short work of the pleasantries. They did an awkward waltz for a second where Rhodes tired to take his duffel bag and Steve sidestepped it. Rhodes didn't push it, and he let Steve hobble along next to him without comment, staying next to him as though Steve's knee were not dictating their pace. Fortunately, it wasn't far; Mount Olive was a small place with a small train station that looked left over from Victorian times, a single platform with a ticket booth that had a sign in it flipped to CLOSED and a station house with a steeply peaked roof and gingerbread trim. A cool breeze drove skittering dry leaves along the sidewalk in front of them, sunny for the moment but heavy with the damp scent of rain. There were few cars in the lot, and none that looked like something Rhodes would drive. He pointed to a gleaming vintage car, low and open on the top, shining the color of red lipstick from the 80s. It was beautiful, and it looked familiar.

"Is that..."

"It's a Ferarri 308 GTS," Rhodes said with a chuckle of pride. "You might be a little too young to recognize it."

"It reminds me of something," he said. It was making him think, for some reason, of being home sick from school. A daytime TV sort of feel.

"Tom Selleck drove it on Magnum PI," Rhodes said.

"That's it," Steve said. "It looks just like it." Bucky's older brother had had a poster of it, he thought.

"It's the same one," Rhodes said. "I hope you don't mind. I don't get to take her out as much as I'd like to, and it's going to be too cold for a drop top soon."

"No, it's just not what I was expecting. Are you a collector?"

"No," Rhodes said. He slung Steve's bag into the tiny trunk and it only just fit. "This is my only classic. I inherited it along with the job. I should give it to a museum or something, auction it for charity, but it reminds me of...better times, you might say. So I learned how to take care of it and I drive it to some shows once in awhile."

Steve got into the car and worked his stiff leg into the passenger side footwell. He didn't want to make Rhodes worry about him, and it was a unique opportunity, even if he would pay for it later when his leg stiffened up. Rhodes gave him a knowing look, but he didn't say anything. He turned the key and the Ferarri's big engine growled to life, then settled into a surprisingly sedate purr.

"We can let he stretch her legs out a little once we get out of town," Rhodes said. "Guess I'll give you the tour, such as it."

He drove Steve through the small town of Mount Olive, passed a few neat blocks of mostly restored Victorian and Queen Anne houses. A few of them had Historic Register Plaques on the front, and this close to the center of the town, many had small signs for things like law offices and dress boutiques, indicating that they were used for businesses. 

"We're coming down Main Street now," Rhodes said. "Don't blink or you'll miss it." He showed Steve a few blocks of shops, a little cafe where a few people ate or drank from steaming mugs at outdoor tables, a small but handsome library tucked into a converted mansion, and the community center where he would be teaching his art classes.

"You have one in about two weeks," Rhodes told him. "We get a group of regulars who come to all of them."

"Art enthusiasts?" Steve asked. It made him a little nervous to think he would have to teach people in the first place, much less people who had many previous instructors to compare him to.

"Not really. Mostly it's pretty tame, just a bowl of plastic lemons and crap like that. But not much happens here, and a two hour class with a guest artist can supply the gossip mill for weeks. They come to see and be seen, more than anything. They'll be extra curious about you, since they won't find much about your work online anywhere." They drove in companionable silence for a while, leaving the town behind and taking a smooth, curving road through the picturesque countryside surrounding Mount Olive. Rolling hills surrounded by cow fences gave way to a deeper forest. Even with the thinning leaves of October, the trees were dense and isolating, and soon he could see some serious security fences a few yards from the road. The high voltage wire and forbidding KEEP OUT signs didn't seem to go with the dappled shade of the flaming trees, the bright blue sky above, or the brisk breeze ruffling his hair. The thought that had been lingering in his mind since he got the letter accepting him to the fellowship nagged at him once more, stronger now since he was so close to the destination. He looked at Rhodes, his relaxed, honest face, and decided it couldn't hurt to try.

“Were there a lot of applicants?” Steve asked. What he really wanted to say, why did you pick me, seemed too blunt even for Rhodes.

“This is a year-long award that includes room, board, supplies, and a small stipend for any artistic medium, and all you have to do is teach a few classes and host a gallery show at the end. We got thousands of applicants before we started the invitation system, and we still consider the first five hundred unsolicited portfolios we receive. The judging is really just up to me. I have a few interns or something who whittle it down first, but by the terms of the thing I have the final say.”

“It must take a lot of your time,” Steve said.

“It does. I think that’s why it was set up like it is, as a private gag on me. So I have to spend several weeks every summer getting uncomfortably current with whatever is going on in the art world, read some essays, make somebody’s dream come true. Why? You not feeling good about it? The classes, or what?”

“No, it’s great. I just feel like I took it from people who wanted it more. Who would make better use of it.” The honest answer jumped out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop it. He kept himself from adding that he felt that way about his entire life in general, that he had lived to spend his time alone and broken when so many others had died and left gaping holes in the lives of other people. Rhodes didn’t flinch, but Steve could see something like understanding in his eyes.

“You want to know why I picked you, is that it?”

“Something like,” Steve admitted. “I sent mine in at the last minute, and I doubt I have the most impressive portfolio.” He didn’t say he had half-assed the thing, but it was pretty much true. He’d only had some rough sketches from his field journal to submit for recent work, and he’d drawn a blank on the essay question, staring for over an hour at the screen every day for a week trying to think of an answer, any answer, for why he deserved an opportunity like this, for what he would do with it. He barely remembered what he’d written in his response and sent off minutes before the final deadline, but he hoped he hadn’t admitted that his therapist was making him or that he hoped he could escape the dead people who followed him around wanting things he couldn’t give them.

“Sam Wilson wrote you a hell of a recommendation letter,” Rhodes said. “And I trust him. He has an open invitation to send cases like yours to me for consideration, but he rarely does. You have talent, as well, I could see it in your work. Some people only submit one or two things. I like those. Shows focus. But I decided based on your essay.”

“Oh. Right.” What did I even say in my essay, he thought.

“You didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew you needed it. We don’t tell people the real primary judging criteria in the brochure, you know, because knowing it wouldn’t help anybody. But the real thing I ask myself before I make that phone call is who would Tony Stark have picked? And I knew he would have picked you. So you got it. I hope it helps.”

“Thanks. It does help,” Steve lied. He didn’t know much about Tony Stark. He vaguely remembered that his life had been scandalous, the sort of thing that showed up on the cover of tabloids, and his death had been an absolute media circus the year that Steve and Bucky graduated from high school. Somewhere deep in his mind, curiosity stirred, a feeling that had been dormant since that bloody day in Afghanistan. Here was someone who had known him, apparently been close to him, putting Steve much less than six degrees from a celebrity. But he squashed the sensation and went in silence as they drove slowly down the private drive. Even had it been a much stronger desire to know, it would be rude to pump Rhodes for information, gruesome even, though Rhodes seemed to expect at least a few questions. Hearing that Tony Stark would have chosen him to live on his estate and pretend to be an artist was not much comfort, even less satisfying than his mother telling him he had his dead father’s eyes.

“Here we are,” Rhodes announced. They pulled to a stop on a dusty driveway. “Home sweet home for you, at least for the next few months.” The house was unassuming but well built, expertly situated to get the best views of the lake, the surrounding carefully curated forest, and the distant mountains where the colors of fall were already mixed in with the green. Wind chimes swayed on a low front porch and created a soothing mellow sound like distant church bells and the air smelled like water, dust, and sunshine. He got out and stretched his stiff knee, but found Rhodes already casually holding his duffel, as though he did this all the time.

Inside, the house was cool and dark. Rhodes showed him the kitchen and apologized for the size, even though it was larger than Steve’s entire apartment in the city and had appliances 150 years newer than the the house. The entire west side of the downstairs was an enormous studio, flooded with late afternoon sunlight in honey-bright squares on the polished wooden floors. Steve thought this had likely been a study or library before, as the walls were paneled with dark wood up to shoulder height and beige plaster above. A remaining set of shelving now held art supplies, an assortment of books and magazines on art history and techniques, and an elderly but serviceable stereo. He breathed in the comforting scents of artistic work and the signs of it around the room, smudges of paint and pencil and plaster dust. The view through the glass was breathtaking, a panoramic view of the lake that stretched nearly the whole floor-to-ceiling height and width of the ground floor of the house.

“That is known locally as Stark’s Pond,” Rhodes told him. The ground outside the house sloped down to the lakeshore and sun glinted off the placid, dark water. He could see trees on the far side and guessed it was about half a mile across and maybe three quarters of a mile long. “It’s safe to swim in, if you like. There’s a small pier out the back of the house and there used to be a canoe in the shed if she’s still seaworthy.” Rhodes gestured at the lake but avoided looking at it despite its beauty. “And there’s a little dirt trail that circles it and comes back here that you can use during the day.”

“Not after dark?” Steve asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Rhodes said. “I would recommend you stick close to the house after dark. Stane’s security knows you’re here, but they can get jumpy around strangers.” Steve couldn’t be sure, but that didn’t seem to be what Rhodes really wanted to warn him about. He decided to follow this advice in particular. He was not sure what he was looking for here, but it definitely wasn’t trouble, and he didn’t want to get kicked out or cause problems for Rhodes, either. An overstuffed chaise sat at an angle to the window, the leopard print velvet worn away in places and speckled with paint and other stains in others, but it looked comfortable and Rhodes smiled at the ugly old thing for just a moment, at some memory he chose not to share. “See anything you need?”

Steve took a cursory look around and found the shelves well stocked with paper, blank sketchbooks, canvas, pencils, all manner of paints, a dizzying feast of supplies that would have made him itch with desire a few years ago.

“Looks good,” he said. Rhodes smiled at his stoicism.

“Well, if you find anything, or run out, you can order it. There’s instructions for how to do it in this binder here, along with contact numbers and some other stuff. Nothing delivers out here, of course, but Rosa will get you anything you put on her list. She usually makes some meals in little containers you can heat up plus some basics like cereal and deli meat and eggs. You didn’t fill anything out for your dietary restrictions and preferences,” Rhodes said, and it wasn’t really a question.

“I’m not picky,” Steve said. These days he had to set an alarm to remind himself to eat, usually, or he wouldn’t do it. Years of army food had left him able to stomach almost anything. 

The front hall led past a wooden staircase to the back door and a wide deck which also looked over the sloping lawn and the dark lake, but was better situated to take advantage of morning sunlight. This seemed to be the main area for dining, though there was a small table in the kitchen, and from here he could see the short pier reaching into the lake. With the door open, he could smell the water, cold and faintly metallic, and for some reason he doubted he would ever swim in it. 

Rhodes showed him the trail around the lake and pointed out the shed where the deck furniture and other odds and ends were stored in the winter before they went back inside. The hallway with the stairs bisected the lower story of the house and he could see the front door from the back and vice versa, which left him with an unexplained feeling of unease. The house’s only phone was at the base of the stairs and had a rotary dial. Despite everything being scrupulously clean, it gave off the impression of being dusty. Rosa’s list was on a small table in the hall below the phone and it bid him welcome in a tight feminine hand on the top sheet of the crisp pad. She had laid out what was available to eat along with heating instructions and written out the answers to some common questions about her schedule and the house itself.

“The bedroom is upstairs,” Rhodes said, and he decided not to dance around the question. “Is that going to be a problem?” Because Steve had also left the accessibility questions on the application blank, refusing to admit he had a cane and could hardly bend his knee some days, lying but only by omission.

“No,” Steve said, but he didn’t meet his eyes. “I had a third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn and I need to keep in practice.” Rhodes, mercifully, just nodded and didn’t push it, didn’t ask him if he’s sure, really sure, or tell him it was no problem to move things around for him. He didn’t let pity creep into his eyes. To thank him, Steve walked up the stairs at a normal pace even though he was still stiff from the car ride, and since Rhodes still had his bag slung over his shoulder like an afterthought he hardly needed to use his cane. The top floor was smaller, a long rectangular bedroom with a double bed and a desk tucked between deep gabled windows and a small bookshelf filled with a wide assortment of secondhand shop recreational reading. Across the hall there was a bathroom so far out of date it would be called charming by every real estate agent in New York, all the fixtures gleaming and surrounded with black and white porcelain tiles. There was even a claw foot tub, but it had a shower and a towel bar and space to store things. His rented room in the city had a shared bath with only a grungy shower that barely drained, so small that the door couldn’t clear the toilet with the seat down and he had to stand almost in the shower to open or close it.

“I keep saying we should get around to doing a remodel,” Rhodes said. “But then we’d have to have a year we didn’t award the fellowship, fill out all the tax papers…”

“It’s a great space,” Steve said. The house was so quiet he could hear the breeze. No people, no cars, and not a single ghost. Even Bucky couldn’t find him here, in a place so far removed from anything they had ever done together.

Rhodes promised to be in touch with him later to arrange dates and topics for his classes and left him to get “settled in” with another handshake, less awkward than their first. Steve heard him go down the stairs, out the door, get into the car. The big engine seemed loud enough to shake the walls after he had become used to the house’s silence. He listened for the car going up the drive as long as he could, but it soon faded away, blanketing the house in quiet again. His breathing and even the faint rustle of his clothes became noticeable.

“Now what?” he asked the house. He’d asked himself, his therapist, Sam, even his dead friends that same question, if not in so many words, ever since he woke up in the field hospital and found that he could see the dead again, as he had when he was a child. He hadn’t received an answer before, and he didn’t get one now.

He unpacked his duffel, an uninspired selection of khakis and jeans and plain tees, into the chipped but expensive wardrobe. He hung up his leather jacket and his one button up shirt. He changed clothes, mostly for something to do, and put on his sneakers. He picked up his cane, put it down again, then snatched it up, angry with himself.

“There’s no one here, Steve,” he muttered. “Stop lying.” He limped down the stairs and the gristly crackle in his knee seemed louder than his halting footsteps. He let himself onto the back porch and stopped for a moment to wonder why he was trying to be so quiet himself. He felt like a houseguest uncertain of his welcome, creeping around to avoid notice so he wouldn’t intrude. He wasn’t used to being alone, he thought. In Brooklyn he could never truly separate himself from the millions of lives going on all around him, people laughing and talking and arguing and making love in the street or the hallway or the apartment next door or down the block with the window open, the whir and clank of an elderly window AC unit, the lights that never went out and the traffic that barely slowed even in the middle of the night. 

He’d loved the bustle before he went away and found it could soothe him like a lullaby and wake him without an alarm. When he came back he found that the city never slept and so neither could he. Every shout, every honk, every time a train rumble by, quickened his pulse and dumped adrenaline into his system and forced him to argue himself down, that he was not in a war zone and these sounds were not threatening. When he did sleep, he was right back in the desert, trying over and over again to change what had happened, trying to dream a version of that blinding sunny day where he had spotted the bomb in time and failing until he thrashed himself awake, his swollen knee packed with broken glass and the ghosts of IV needles in his arm.

He shook himself out of the train of thought before it could overwhelm him again. He went back into the house and still heard the tap and shuffle of his gait down the hardwood floor, glad he'd thought to put a cap on the cane so he wouldn't scratch the finish. I've been frozen long enough, he thought. I don't know where I'm going, but I have to go somewhere.

It wasn't a large enough house for pacing back and forth (not that that had stopped him before; his apartment in the city would have fit into a closet in this house), and the approaching sunset made him remember Colonel Rhodes' warning- don't wander in the woods after dark. His nearest neighbor was a paranoid billionaire arms manufacturer and Steve had no doubt his security was every bit as jumpy as he'd heard. Steve himself was probably just skilled enough, and just crazy enough, that a run in with them would lead to someone getting shot.

"Time to get to work," he said to no one. He was glad the colonel hadn't asked about his project, because he had no idea what he was going to do. He'd always had a knack for drawing, ever since he was too small to remember, and his mother had made sure that no matter how poor they were he had whatever supplies she could get him. The days after his bout with meningitis and pneumonia had left him stuck in bed, too weak to even sit up for long, listless and bored except for when he had visitors. Bucky came when he could, and Steve read his school books and did the homework assignments, but he'd already missed two months of class and wasn't going back any time soon. Bucky never wanted to let Steve see what he was working on, and it took weeks before Steve was suspicious enough to check. His friend had been careful to fill his assignments with incorrect answers, misspelled words, sloppy, tortured handwriting, and Steve knew it was all an act. "Why?" he'd asked. Bucky's family was little better off than Steve's own, but Bucky was smart and loved the library. "Do you want to flunk out?"

"I want to get held back a year," Bucky confessed, and he didn't meet Steve's eye. Steve had ranted at him until is lungs gave out again and he had to lie down, and then any time he could after that, but Bucky got his wish. They hadn't been separated.

His other visitor was much less welcome. What had been little more than an eerie feeling and a few unexplained noises in the apartment escalated once Steve came home, and while his mother was working their tiny apartment bustled with sourceless noises and scents, clouds of white or dark mist, and menacing shadows flitting along the walls or crossing door frames. That was how it started, but then dead people started walking through the walls. They sat on his bed, or paced up and down the floor, or just stared at him, and Steve had been able to wonder, even in his fear, if they were as surprised to see him as he was them. As his strength returned, they faded, but his home remained active with things unseen. The ones he could still see were stronger, newer, more desperate, and once they found him they seemed to get stronger and stronger until they could communicate what they wanted to him.

He perused the workroom with its bountiful art supplies as he thought back to his early days with ghosts. He had rarely seen them since his mother died, but now Bucky kept turning up. Steve had never seen the spirit of anyone he had known in life before, and it figured that the one person he wanted more than anything to talk to never said anything. Steve didn't know what Bucky wanted, besides acknowledgement. He'd said he was sorry a thousand times or more, in words, in his mind, in his heart. He'd offered to take his place, and he'd meant it, as much as anyone living could ever mean that particular impossible promise. None of it helped. Bucky was dead, and he always would be from here until eternity. It was Steve's fault. How could he make that right? Bucky had been the most alive person he knew, and he would never forgive Steve, just follow him from place to place, silently reminding him that they were now separated forever. They should have come home together, whether it was on their feet or in their caskets.

He really had to stop thinking about it. He needed to move, to make something. He grabbed a sketchbook from the shelf without looking at it. He knew the brand, though, and he knew this one book would have set him back a week of groceries, and that made him hesitate. Maybe he should look around a little further, see if they had a cheap legal pad lying around or something more in keeping with his nervous doodling. He ran his hand over the soft cover and down the nameless spine, holding halfway between possession and abandonment.

"I need to stop thinking like that, too," he said. "And maybe work on the whole talking to myself thing while I'm at it. I'm here, these things are mine, I'm allowed to use them." He brought the sketchbook decisively to him and limped away from the shelf. His therapist always had him do stuff like that- affirming that he had a right to exist in the world, to take up space and make a life, and that he should argue back when the guilt or disorientation or whatever that moment's particular demon happened to be said otherwise.

He sat down at the big wooden desk and set the book on the rough blotter paper. He found he had a box of charcoal pencils in his hand that he did not remember picking up or even seeing over there. Charcoal wasn't usually his style- he preferred graphite or ink- but somehow they felt right. He had nothing in particular in mind that he wanted to draw, but it seemed like his subconscious at least was in the mood for something monochrome, stark and smudgy.

When he flipped the book open, he knew instantly that it was not new. The spine wasn't stiff and it fell into a comfortable flat sprawl on the desk. It wasn't blank, either. It had fallen open to a sketch, a landscape worked in charcoal pencil. He brushed the tips of his fingers over the dark, curving lines of a lake in the moonlight. There was something about the drawing that he didn't trust, something uneasy, brooding, and disturbingly familiar. He looked up, trying to think what it was, and the mental image of the drawing superimposed over what he was seeing. The artist had drawn the view out the window of this room, and the lake was the quiet, black surface of Stark's Pond. That was why it seemed familiar, but there was something else about it, disquieting despite the peacefulness of the scene. He looked out the window again and realized how quickly the sun set out here in the woods, with no light except the stars and moon. It had been late afternoon when he'd come in here and now it was full dark, so either the light had failed rapidly or he'd been sitting here longer than he thought.

He turned on the lights and pondered the drawing in front of him for another moment, but he still couldn't put his finger on what it was. He turned the pages back to the front of the sketchbook instead.

The front flap listed the artist's name, Maggie Partridge, and a phone number with a New York area code. The name sounded familiar to Steve but he couldn't place it immediately. He let it roll around in his mind and turned the front pages of the sketchbook. The earliest drawings were explosions of color, bright rainforest landscapes and Carnival dancers and skeletons playing music with magnificent butterfly wings behind them. Studies, he thought, for larger works, maybe paintings, done with colored pencils or oil crayons. Beautiful and lively, almost psychedelic in their vividness. They were nothing like anything Steve would ever draw, but he liked them. Then he remembered where he'd heard the name before. Maggie Partridge had been a rising star in the art world when he was in college and he'd seen reproductions of her work in magazines and journals that specialized in discovering new talents. He had no idea what had happened to her after that. He hadn't heard her name in the city, but he hadn't paid attention to the scene since he'd left school, and he'd not cared about it that much when he was there. He never cared what other people thought of his work, he just wanted to create, so he hadn't sought gallery showings or art critics. He should look her up and return this. If she hadn't completed the pieces, she might want the studies back, and even if she had, things like this could be valuable.

He kept flipping through her sketches and doodles, and he saw she'd begun to incorporate much darker colors in her drawings, then a central dark void that began to take on more and more prominence. Stark's Pond. She had drawn her skeletons and ghosts dancing around it, drawn it lurking incongruous and threatening in the background of a lush jungle in bloom, then it moved to the foreground and seemed to get closer and closer to the viewer until it took up the whole space. Then she had added another element that began repeating- a skeletal figure, more realistic and threatening than the jolly, cavorting bones of the early drawing, that stepped out of the lake, crowned with a fall of red hair the color of blood. There were only a few of these, then the drawing of the empty pond he'd already seen, then nothing.

"What on earth?" he asked the empty room. He had thought he would enjoy the peace of a disconnected house, but he really wished he could Google Maggie Partridge at the moment and see her current work, or at least find out how long ago she had been in the house. There were no dates on the sketchbook. He tried the listed number from the house's elderly landline, but got a message that it was no longer in service. He put the sketchbook back on the shelf and buried it under some old Art World magazines, and tried to take his mind off the strange progression in the sketches. He sat down to work, wanting the physical sensation of doing something with his hands more than anything else, but the slippery charcoal distracted him. It was new, a challenge, and it reminded him of what he'd seen in the sketchbook, Stark's Pond by moonlight. 

He doodled irritably for awhile, but at last he gave it up as a lost cause and pulled a large book about Late Medieval religious art off the shelf at random and tried to concentrate on the craft of them. The bloody martyrdoms and battling crusaders matched his mood more than he would have liked to admit. After the second time he dozed off in the chaise, he limped his way up to his bedroom and took his shoes off, then lay in the bed fully clothed and stared at the ceiling. I'll get started tomorrow, he promised. There must be something around here worth drawing. He could hear wind rattling the leaves outside, and even the gentle lap of the lake, and as full night came over the house he realized how country dark it was out here.

His new found resolve to focus on his work was challenged the next day. Sheets of rain poured from the sky, lashed against the house and wept in long trails down the window panes. Now that he had a good reason to stay inside, he found he felt trapped in the house with no inspiration. He listened to the radio and tried to ignore the fuzz and crackle in the signal. He sat on the old chaise with his sketchbook in his lap and a pencil dangling from his fingers, but he watched the rain like a screen full of static. Dusk came in the afternoon along with a lull in the storm. Steve roused himself as a heavy, soaking rain drummed on the roof and sent ripples across the dark surface of the lake. As if waking from sleep, he realized how cold he had gotten, the damp chill seeping into the house through the window along with the watery gray light. His knee had stiffened up and it ached as he stretched it, bending slowly to work the blood back into the joint.

“Fucking thing,” he swore, holding his knee in his hands. His neglected pencil rolled down the slope of the blank open page and dropped, bouncing on the rug and under the chaise. Steve ignored as the pain in his leg got sharper. He swore again and a puff of white escaped his mouth with his breath. Startled, he gasped and sucked in air as though that would help, but his breath still steamed when he released it. The bare skin of his arms prickled and his fingers were so cold they felt numb. How could it be so cold? The outside temperature was in the fifties, cold for this early in the autumn but not frigid. He watched a half dozen breaths steam in and out and knew he should move, but he felt frozen, vulnerable and worst of all, observed. He thought if he turned around someone would be standing behind him, watching him, or watching the rain.

The radio jumped, then, a hiss of static and jumbled sound, and it startled Steve into looking behind him, pulse pounding so loud in his ears that he could scarcely register the music it was now emitting, having settled on a new station. The room was empty, lonely, the corners lost in shadow as the weak daylight failed. The radio now played something old fashioned, a swing tune that Steve could not quite identify.

“I must be losing it,” he muttered. “Just an old radio. An old, drafty house.” He tried to breathe normally and slow his racing heart, to suppress the urge to go and get his sidearm out of the locked case upstairs. He stood up and stumbled to the table, impatient with his limp. He clicked the radio off and stood in the dim, quiet room.

A sound behind him got his attention, though he couldn’t have said what it was. Something like a splash, outside, loud enough to hear over the rain but not distinct. Steve looked around again and his pulse spiked faster. He peered through the rain-dotted glass to the strip of green lawn, the black mirror of the lake and the impressionist smudge of red and orange foliage on the far shore and quickly honed in on what was different— a body floating in the water, white against the dark water and gray sky.

Steve ran, adrenaline drowning out the pain in his knee, and he was out the back door, down the wooden steps and across the lawn before he had any time to think about what he was doing. The water was shockingly cold when he dove in but he ignored it, swimming for the deeper water with strong strokes. When his feet could no longer touch the pebbled bottom he stopped, treading water and favoring his leg as he looked around for the person he had seen. Rain splashed against his face and the wind picked up, but Steve peered into it, rotating himself in the water.

“Hello?” he called. He looked back toward the house to be sure he was in the right area and could see the outline of the window he’d been looking through, blazing with light in the dark house.

Steve was sure he had not turned the light on before he left, but there it was. Had someone gotten into the house? Or had he done it himself, one of the autopilot actions he’d taken on his way out? He’d taken his shoes off somewhere, he realized, before he dove into the lake. He swam in a wide circle and tried to dive, but the water below the surface was cold and dark and the gray sky did not give him enough light to penetrate more than a few feet. There was no sign of anyone in the water except for him, and no sign that anyone had been there, no clothes or ripples or sounds, nothing. Steve swam to shore and limped back to the house, paying for his actions now that the rush was over. His knee felt loose and hot in his chilled body and he knew it would be swollen in a few hours. He stood, shivering, just inside the back door of the house and dripped on the tile. The house felt warm after his soaking and he limped through the rooms, feeling ridiculous, to check for intruders. He saw no sign of anything, but he approached the workroom with caution. Light spilled out of the doorway, like he’d seen from outside, and he heard the faint sound of swing music playing.

He checked all the doors and windows in the entire house, but found no trace of anyone except for his own wet footprints in the hall. He toweled off and mopped up the worst of the water from the hardwood. He made sure all the lights were out and unplugged the radio. He retreated to the shower and let the water run over him, comforting even if he had to put it all the way on hot to get it to come out warm. He knew it would run out soon, but he still stood for a minute and let it just wash over him, breathing in and out. There was nothing there, he told himself. It must have been a reflection, a trick of the light, the way the rain was falling that made it look like it was moving. You reacted to what you thought was someone in danger and you turned on the light without realizing it. The house is safe. 

He repeated his breathing exercises and a litany of calming thoughts, the way his mother had once said the rosary, and let the shower soak the chill from his body. His knee throbbed and his heart refused to calm down all the way, but he felt steadier as he absently scrubbed himself with the soft, lopsided old washcloth. The soap smelled like cedar and he wondered who had chosen it. He closed his eyes and stood under the shower head to rinse his hair.

The water lost pressure for a heartbeat and without even a sound from the pipes came back much harder. Cold water pelted him, hard enough to sting, and he swore and groped for the faucet. He wrenched it shut but it didn’t stop, blasting him with frigid water until he struggled free of the shower curtain and stood panting and naked on the bath mat. The water roared and hissed against the porcelain and plastic and his bad knee felt like it had been stuffed with razors. His heart pounded and he put a hand on the wall to steady himself. Once the worst of the pain and shock had passed, he worked his hand back into the shower to try to turn the faucet again. It was pushed all the way to the off position; as soon as his fingers brushed it, the water stopped as suddenly and completely as it had begun. Steve backed away and sat on the toilet before his leg could give out, dripping and resting his face in his hands. He felt cold and vulnerable and snatched his towel from the rack for warmth and cover. The water dripping from his hair filled his mouth and nostrils with the familiar dark metallic tang of the lake.

Steve got a pain pill and got into bed. He shivered under the bedspread, the pool of light from the bedside lamp bringing him small comfort. He picked up a book at random, a dog-eared copy of Catch-22, and tried to read, but the swirl of his thoughts and the cacophony of pain in his aggravated knee kept distracting him. He got up again and paced in and out of the light, trying to stretch his knee. Rain drummed on the roof and rattled on the small garrett windows, but outside all was black in the moonless night. The lake was out there, and it bothered him that he couldn’t see it. 

What had he seen? He was sure it was something, but he was equally sure it wasn’t any physical person he’d seen floating in the lake. An echo, maybe, of something from the past. Like Bucky. Alone out here he could admit, at least to himself, that he had seen Bucky since his death, even if he would never want to tell anyone else about it. Bucky had known about the others, the ones he’d seen as a child, and Bucky had believed him, but Bucky was gone and there was no one else to tell. The radio, the lights, the shower, all of that he could excuse as the products of an old house and his own unconscious actions, but the body in the lake concerned him. Unable to rest, he finally got a pencil and a sketchbook from the writing desk and tried to draw what he’d seen.

He let go of his conscious mind and stopped insisting that it had to make sense. It was only a drawing of a memory, an impression of something, and he focused on remembering rather than explaining. He sketched for an hour or more in the dim golden light and when his hand stopped he found he’d filled several pages with the image. A pale human form repeated throughout the drawings, slender but masculine, face down in the water and surrounded by the floating bloom of a loose, indistinct garment. A shock of dark hair stood out darker than the water. A young man, Steve judged, but he couldn’t pinpoint much more.

Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked. Steve looked up from his drawings and listened, though his heartbeat sped up so sharply he wasn’t sure he could hear anything over it. Another creak, faint but distinct, in the downstairs hall if he had to guess. Had he been so distracted that he hadn’t heard a door open? Or was he just jumping at shadows? He’d honed his senses, his reflexes, in a war zone, and they hadn’t had the time or the training to blunt the edges very much before they’d sent him on his way.. He knew he wasn’t ready to be around normal people yet, but was he still so jumpy he couldn’t handle an old house?

He sat still in his chair, taut and quivering like a wire, and listened. He tried to separate out the thud of his pulse in his ears and the steady, pattering hiss of the rain and hear anything out of place. The sound was there, real, and unmistakable- no settling of a house matched the rhythmic tread of footsteps on a wood floor. It sounded like someone pacing somewhere below him, back and forth in the kitchen or the workroom. Steve took a deep breath, had an argument with himself about his sanity (which he lost), and got up. He limped as quietly as he could over to his bed, though he doubted whoever was downstairs would fail to notice, and he slid his sidearm out from under the bed. It was clean and loaded, but from force of habit he checked it anyway. He did not take the safety off- too many years of training had taught him to only do that if he was sure he was ready to shoot someone, and he wasn’t there yet. Any number of people could have keys to the house, he thought, and might even have a valid reason to be here. Maybe they weren’t even aware of him; he hadn’t exactly made himself at home. What little he had brought was almost all in the bedroom. He clutched to the voice of reason as the footsteps continued, pacing back and forth without pause, just loud enough that he could not ignore them but never coming any closer. The moment dragged on for what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes at most, until Steve could hardly stand it. He knew it was a bad idea, armed or not, to go downstairs and confront whoever it was. He wouldn’t react like a normal person and someone would get hurt, but the feeling of threat was driving him mad.

He stood up and headed for the door, gun still in his hand, but as soon as he moved the footsteps stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Once again Steve strained to hear what the intruder was doing, but there was nothing, no more steps, definitely no sound from either of the heavy doors. There was not even a feeling of presence anymore, not that he would have wanted to explain that beyond a hunch. The house fell quiet and he felt that he was alone, despite the adrenaline still running through him like an electric current. He tried to convince himself that he had imagined the whole thing and that he should go to bed, but he couldn’t. He put the gun back where it belonged and crept down the narrow stairs. The house was quite dark on the cloudy night, and Steve lingered at the top of the stairs until his eyes adjusted.

He wasn’t sure what he expected, but nothing downstairs was out of place. The front door was locked, as were all the windows, and his single plate and spoon from dinner were drying in the dish rack. He worked his way toward the back, mostly convinced that he’d been dreaming, or hallucinating. Maybe picking up an echo, dialed in on the man in the lake by his concentration. His bare foot came down in something cold and he startled back. Wet footprints tracked in from the back door, five distinct steps, and vanished abruptly. None led back out, or anywhere else in the house. He unlocked the door, still bolted from the inside, and turned on the porch light. It gleamed silver off the deep black of the lake, but the porch itself was dry, and not a footprint in sight. He locked the door and mopped the floor again. What else could he do? He could dismiss the rest as the result of a tired mind, maybe, but the footprints were real. Once the hall floor was dry, he limped his way back to bed and listened to the night until he finally fell asleep.

  
  
  


The next morning bright sunshine woke him, a golden ray falling right over his eyes. He expected to be more tired than he was, but he felt refreshed from his short sleep. The events of the night before seemed far away and minor as he looked at the crystalline blue of the sky set off against the flame of the trees. A low mist hung over the ground as the sun warmed and dried the sodden grass, but even the lake looked innocuous in the light, more green and peaceful. A drift of small golden leaves speckled the still surface of the water. Even his knee was less sore than he’d expected.

Steve made a fried egg sandwich and took it out on the porch. There was still a chill in the air which would probably not go away entirely until spring, but he was warm in the sun. His hand itched to draw and he spent the morning sketching and coloring the landscape, brief and soothing exercises that took his mind away from the war, the grief, and the bizarre events of the last few days. He made himself study the lake and try to capture the bright leaves, like a spill of golden coins, and the way the red maples and blue sky reflected on the surface. He let himself see there was nothing there, no dead people with their silent accusations, just a picturesque and secluded body of water.

He went in for lunch and ate at the kitchen table, but he still felt a bit uneasy in the house. He put on his old leather jacket and went wandering around the lake instead, letting his feet take him where they would. He stood at the end of the dock and looked down into the water. It stood dark and nearly still except for a faint lapping against the pylons, so flat he could see his reflection. He sat down at the edge and then lowered himself onto his chest, though he wasn’t sure why he wanted to. His head hung over the edge of the wood and he reached down to dip his fingers in the lake. The water itself was cold enough to sting his fingers but it was clear and totally ordinary, though it did have the distinctive smell of the lake, metallic and earthy. He let it run through his fingers and watched the drops splash and ripple, sun on the water dazzling his eyes.

The wind shifted, he thought, blowing across the water, and he whole body went cold. He started up, realizing at once how vulnerable he had been, lying out in the open alone. He felt eyes all over him and despite the peaceful New England surroundings he was back in the desert. A sniper lurked in every tree and his mind raced to locate his men and get them out.

“They aren’t here,” he told himself. He shut his eyes and fought the rising instinctive dread, the adrenaline that flooded his body every time the memories surfaced. Though his pulse hammered in his ears he forced himself deeper into his body, drew and released a controlled breath. His skin buzzed with the sense that he was being watched, tracked by something silent and invisible, like it was trying to twist itself off his skeleton to get away from whatever was looking at him. This is the worst it’s ever been, he thought. Worse than the train station, even worse than the supermarket in Jersey City. He counted each exhale and promised himself that when he reached ten he could open his eyes.

As he inhaled for the eighth time a pocket of sharp, sudden cold surrounded him as though he stepped out into a blizzard, or into a meat locker. His controlled breath ended in a gasp and he sucked the icy air into his throat. The cold but unmistakable weight of a hand settled onto his shoulder. Steve opened his eyes and wrenched his neck around but he was alone on the dock. The touch vanished as suddenly as it had come. The sun still shone, the water lapped at the columns, and a faint breeze rustled the bright leaves, but no one was behind him. He looked down again, into the water, and for just a moment he saw two faces reflected in the lake, his own and another, an impression of pale skin, dark eyes, and a shock of hair blacker than the lake. Again he looked behind him to find nothing and no one there, and when he turned back to the water the second face rippled and dissolved. He got his feet under him and backed up, not wanting to turn away from the water, and a few steps from the edge the unnatural cold stopped. He could feel the warmth of the sinking autumn sun and the mundane chill of a cool wind. The scent of the lake was everywhere and the trees still had eyes on him. Cursing himself for a fool, Steve went back into the house to make a strong pot of coffee.


	2. Chapter 2

What he needed, he decided, was work. Since he'd arrived, he hadn't produced anything except a pile of sketches on an imagined murder scene, and he certainly wasn't going to show those to Colonel Rhodes.

"No more distractions," he told himself over his second mug of coffee. "Either there really is a spirit in this house, and it will communicate with me when it's ready or able, or there's nothing here and I'm just losing it. If it's all in my head, then that's all the more reason to find something else to take my mind off it. I'm also talking to myself, for what that's worth. Sam said this would be a good opportunity to work through my issues." He refreshed his coffee again and took the mug into the work room. He paused in the doorway, giving himself a moment to scan the room for anything out of place, or to pick up any energy that lingered there. Everything seemed to be where he'd left it and the room seemed neutral, but the house still felt occupied, somehow, as though Steve were not alone there. Steve ignored the sensation, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway. He didn't want to be confined to a sketchpad today. He wanted something bigger, something that would take up his whole field of vision and give him something to complete in the coming days. He chose a canvas as wide as his arm span and set it up on an easel facing the door to take advantage of the natural light coming through the window behind him.

The process of preparing the canvas soothed him. He didn't have much of a plan for what he wanted to put on it but he was also going to ignore the part of his mind that wanted to insist he was wasting supplies, time, effort, etc and could never make something worthwhile as damaged as he was. That was the PTSD, he knew, and before the bomb there had still always been the nagging voice of poverty that said he shouldn't have even this one canvas to paint and if he ruined it he couldn't get another. I am allowed this, he thought. This is my house.

He made up a palette without putting a lot of conscious thought into, going with his instinct and enjoying the pure tactile thrill of multiple, untouched tubes of acrylic paints. He laid out some tools, brushes that were new and stiff but had a nice feel in his fingers or a pleasing shape to the bristles. He looked over what he'd chosen with an eye to what he would shape with the colors and saw immediately the harsh deserts of Afghanistan, muddy brown and golden and so, so red. He shut his eyes and fought the surge of emotion that came along with the thought. He did a breathing exercise almost by instinct and tried to let go. Just feel it, he thought. Try to remember how it looked. Not the day it happened, but those first weeks in country, when you thought everything was beautiful and your hands ached for a pen. The land didn't hurt you. The desert didn't take Bucky. Slowly, without opening his eyes at first, he touched brush to canvas and made a smudge which became a shape which became the first line of this, whatever he was making. His heart pounded in his ears and his whole body shook with the urge to run away, but he kept painting.

His muscles relaxed a degree and he opened his eyes. Bright sunlight flooded his face and made him wince, a tear forming in his eye. He squinted and saw the lake, dark surface gleaming in the afternoon sun, reflecting through the window glass. He did not remember turning around. He certainly didn't remember repositioning the heavy easel and the unwieldy canvas, but he was no longer set up facing the door. The skin on his neck prickled with the sensation of being watched and he refused to turn around to see who was in the door because he knew there would be only empty air. He limped to the chaise with his cold coffee and sat. His leg throbbed and he could actually feel the urge to create draining out of him. The door was, indeed, quite empty. Nothing was watching him, and nothing moved outside except for ripples in the water and the reflection of clouds scudding across the surface. He gave up on getting anything else done this afternoon. He had made a line and that would have to do for the moment. He sighed and reached for something to read from the shelf, a way to pass the time until he could go up to bed.

He thought to get a volume on landscapes, since that seemed to be the direction his project would take. When he drew his hand back from the shelf, he found he held Maggie Partridge's sketchbook. The one he had hidden, buried under a stack of magazines somewhere. He ran his fingers over the innocuous cover and spine of the haunted book, but he did not open it. He didn't want the cursed lake in his mind anymore than it already was. He put her sketchbook back without looking. It didn't matter where he put things; the house would rearrange them to suit its own needs.

He tried again the next day. It might be a fool's errand, but he didn't have anything else going on and he would eventually have to show something for his time out here. He left the house and walked the path around the lake, taking his time and letting his knee dictate how long it would take. When he needed to rest, he sat on a stone and listened to the wind and leaves sighing around him. He sketched a single tree with laser focus and when he noticed his leg starting to stiffen he found he had created a passing likeness of the plant. He stood and wandered again, but something in the woods caught his attention and he shuffled down the bank to get a clearer look through the trees.

The Stark Mansion lurked above the lake, brooding in a cloak of red trees. From here, he could only make out the roof line, but once he knew what he was looking at he was able to follow the signs down the slope to the bank of the lake itself. A high fence cut through the trees, crowned with razor wire and studded with signs warning that trespasser would be electrocuted or shot on sight. He should steer clear, but it was such a bright sunny morning, and he had long since stopped being afraid of death, so he got a little closer. He wasn't stupid enough to leave the path, but he stared through the trees. The undergrowth that carpeted the more normal woods near the lake house had been shorn away here, and guard stations and surveillance towers had been camouflaged into the landscape. Steve's trained eye could spot them, and a few spots he thought likely contained traps and maybe sniper's nests, and he knew that what he could see wouldn't be all of the security. Was Stane just paranoid? What did he get up to in his secluded home that warranted such measures? Steve stood for another minute developing some hypothetical plans of assault, running down the roster of specialists he would trust to help him neutralize and take the house. Bucky could have covered a whole platoon from one of those nests if he had enough ammo. Steve ran the whole scenario again, and this time he only "recruited" people he knew were dead. He still had no trouble filling the roster. 

He turned to go and walked into a deep cold that made him suck in a breath in surprise and cough at the unexpected chill. For a moment he couldn't move, frozen to the spot on a mild, sunny autumn morning, the skin of his face just as cold as the skin wrapped beneath three layers of clothing. A flash of movement caught his eyes, a bright flicker of coppery red in the trees. Startled, he tried to follow what he'd seen, but it remained elusive, only an impression. He heard a splash in the water to his side and the cold intensified, stopping his breath and maybe his heart for a beat or two. Then the feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. HE could feel the sun on his face again and if not for the lingering prickle in his skin he would think the whole thing had been an illusion of some kind. He checked the water, but he remembered the phantom body he'd seen a few nights before. That spirit hadn't repeated the performance today, though. There was nothing in the lake when he limped down to the bank, not even a ripple to suggest that he'd heard a flesh and blood creature. He might even think it had been some sort of exotic high tech security measure, but he knew spirits too well to mistake their activity for anything else. I can't help you, he thought at the dark water of Stark's Pond. I can't do anything at all.

He limped back to the porch with a few pages of uninspired botanical sketches, his mind traveling the worn ruts of survivor's guilt and despair. He sat at the table where he liked to eat and stared at the lake, letting the afternoon sun seep warmth into his skin. As he flipped through his sketches, he realized that some of the chairs were missing from the deck and the door into the shed hung open. Something moved in the darkness within the shed, and the chain hung loose from the lock, clinking as it swayed in the wind.

"I can't handle any more weirdness today," Steve muttered. He could close the lock, or check to see if anything was missing, but his brush with Stane's security and the restless spirits who haunted the lake and his own mind had left him on edge. He felt foolish when a man emerged from the shed, a big guy who was at least as tall as Steve himself, muscles showing under his old flannel shirt. The sun glinted off a blonde ponytail as he pulled the shed closed with a bang and wrapped and fastened the chain.

"Hello?" Steve said. The man turned and waved, and walked over the creaking boards with his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

"Sorry if I startled you," he said. It made Steve realize how long it had been since he'd heard another voice, but the stranger had a smooth, pleasant baritone with a faint hint of an accent that Steve couldn't quite place. "I'm Thor Odinson," he said, extending his hand. Steve stared at it for a few seconds longer than was normal before he remembered what he was supposed to do with it and offered his own to shake before it could get any more awkward.

"Steve Rogers," he said. Thor had a firm handshake, and his hands were warm and rough with calluses but there was nothing of dominance in the gesture. He smiled as if he were actually glad to meet Steve, a living person with a normal life.

"I'm the caretaker for the house," Thor explained. "I came by to start preparing the house for winter weather. I knocked, but no one answered."

"I was out," Steve said. "For a walk." Get it together, Steve, he thought. You know how to talk to another person. One word after another. "I'm an art…Well, I'm here on the Fellowship," he concluded. He couldn't introduce himself by his old rank, or as an artist, but he suspected Thor was more than a caretaker as well. He had the body of an underwear model and he carried himself like a man who knew how to fight. He was older than Steve but probably younger than Rhodes, and he had lines around his mouth and eyes like his face had been made for smiling but had been etched deeply with sadness. Thor, Steve thought, would be interesting to draw.

"James told me to expect you," Thor said, and it took Steve a minute to realize he meant Colonel Rhodes. "I wouldn't bother you so early, but we're supposed to have a storm coming in soon, and I wanted to check the shutters."

"It's no bother," Steve said. Thor sounded like he had rehearsed his reasoning; Steve got the impression that he was curious, or lonely, and wanted an excuse to drop by. "Can I, um, can I get you something?" Ever since he woke up in the hospital, people constantly offered him a paper cup with water in it.

"No, thank you," Thor said. "I have a few other things to get to this afternoon." Steve felt a rush of disappointment, which surprised him.

"I hadn't heard about a storm," he said.

"It's been on the news, but you wouldn't be the first to vanish into their work out here."

"All I have is the radio," Steve admitted. "And I turn it off or tune it out whenever they start talking."

"It gets lonesome out here," Thor said. "Has Maria been looking after you? Do you need anything? If something breaks, I take a look at it first."

"No, everything is…great," he said. He didn't think Thor could fix the plumbing problems, or the ghosts.

"Ah. Well, maybe I could come another time, bring dinner. I can get one more use out of the grill before I put it away for the winter. If you would like." Steve might have suspected Thor was asking him out, but he didn't get a romantic vibe from him.

"I can't, I need to work, and I wouldn't want to impose, but…" Thor's face fell, just slightly, and Steve realized what he was doing. He was shutting another person out, keeping a safe distance, refusing to engage. "But what the hell, it sounds like fun." He tried a smile, mostly as an experiment, and Thor returned it.

"Excellent. Perhaps I could come over after your class? It's not supposed to storm until the next day, and we should have a clear night."

"Sounds good," Steve said. Bro date accepted. See, that wasn't so hard, he told himself. He didn't want to think about the class, but he would have to. The activity in the house had distracted him, but it was time to knuckle down to it, as his mother had said. Thor finished up a few more chores before he left while Steve doodled on the porch. He waved goodbye and went around to the front of the house. Steve heard a loud, growling engine and went inside, down the hall to look out the front door. Thor sat astride a large black motorcycle that looked well used, revving it as he fastened a helmet decorated with lightning strikes, but he did not wear leathers. Steve still wasn't sure if he was looking forward to seeing him again, but he thought so. He should email Sam. He would be so proud.

Thor's brief visit made the house even more unnaturally quiet by comparison. The wooden floor creaked under Steve's feet, and he could hear the rubber tip of his cane hitting punctuating the rhythm. He took a random tub out of the refrigerator and heated the contents without much interest. He was running low on eggs and sandwich toppings, but he had some meals to tide him over until the housekeeper came. He thought about the list, but he didn't add anything to it. Whatever she brought would be fine. It was still cold in the middle when he ate it, and he washed his single dish and fork and put them in the drying rack.

He stood at the sink for an extra moment, conscious that he was trying to avoid the work room and angry with himself for it. Finally he stalked down the hall, shuffling and thumping more loudly than necessary to make sure that his presence in the house was unmistakable. He settled in at the easel again, refreshing his paint. It would be nice if the windows in here had curtains on them, he thought. The lake still seemed to watch him, and now he felt the mechanical threat of the Stark Mansion up on its hill surveying him and the whole valley with its cold gaze as well. The quiet was getting to him. He snapped on the radio, leaving it turned low on a local station that was playing something classical and unobtrusive to remind himself that there were other people in the world. He tuned out the deepening dark outside the window and tried to bring his mind back to what he'd been working on that morning, letting color and line flow through him without trying to force the piece to tell him what it wanted to be.

He landed on the floor in the dark, disoriented, with his bad leg numb and rubbery. It was full dark now, and only a wan and silvery moonlight cast shadows over the room. His hand was dark and sticky and for a moment all he could think about was blood, but it was too thick and too cold for that. He raised his palm to his face and sniffed. Paint. His hand was covered in paint and he found the brush and palette on the rug near him, a dark sticky smear tracked over his thigh. How long had he been standing there? The work room was frigid and most of his skin had gone to gooseflesh with it. He cradled his arm in his lap, the acrylic paint already drying on his palms, and he looked up at the canvas to see what he had done.

Bucky looked down on him from the canvas. At least that was his first thought, but the face didn't belong to his friend. He'd painted someone staring into the water from the vantage of someone sinking below the surface, but the face wasn't clear. The piece was hasty, impressionistic, with big splashes of dark colors and frantic brush strokes, like he'd been flailing, trying to break through the surface and draw a breath. It filled him with unease the more he looked at it, drowning in despair and fear. He had no idea where it had come from. He'd never made anything like it, and he never wanted to again. At the same time, he knew exactly where it had come from; that dark water waited just beyond the thin glass, drinking in the same moonlight to disappear in its depths. Silence ruled the house once more; somewhere in his trance, he'd lost the sound of the radio, though he doubted he had been the one to shut it off. There was nothing to hear in the room except the thud of his pulse in his ears.

Hesitant, he reached out and touched the damp paint on the canvas. As soon as the tips of his fingers brushed over the surface, he plunged into a freezing darkness that seemed ephemeral and yet closed over his head like a tomb. His head swam and his stomach twisted with nausea, and he succumbed to vertigo.

He came back to himself once again shivering on the soft, musty rug. The effects of the painting seeped slowly out of his body and he could only be still and wait for them to pass. He had felt drunk, and he still felt numb and cold, but as the sensations faded his leg began to throb again. He crawled over to the chaise, heedless of the tacky half-dried paint on his palm, and tried to haul himself to his feet. Dizziness returned and his gorge rose, but he fought through it to stand. He wanted out of this house, but where would he go? He didn't have a car, and the lake path was barred to him by darkness, and by threats both mundane and supernatural. He didn't even have a television for the illusion of companionship. His knuckles turned white gripping the arm of the chaise and he looked at the floor exclusively. There was nothing safe to look at in this room, permeated with emotions, or memories, that were not his own.

The stereo lit up behind him and it blared at full volume, startling him so badly he might have fallen on the floor again. He collapsed on the chaise as sound blasted his mind, so loud it was barely possible to recognize it as music at all. He groped for his cane, struggled to his feet, and dashed from the room as quickly as he could, Black Sabbath's Iron Man vibrating his clothes with the deep bass. He wasn't sure where to run, whether he should go out the front door, the back door, up the stairs, or clear back to BRooklyn, but as soon as he stepped out of the work room, the music cut off as abruptly as it had started, leaving a deafening silence in its wake. Steve started up the stairs to his room. When he reached the fourth step, the work room door creaked closed and the latch clicked shut behind him.

In the morning he tried to draw again. By daylight, the work room dozed in the sun, the miasma of negative emotions from the night before evaporated like mist from the lake. The canvas still sat on the easel, but in the sunlight it lost some of its power. It still gave off the sense of fear and sinking despair, but in the golden light it was only a moving piece of artwork, not the visceral and mysterious portal into spirit and memory it had been by moonlight.

He took it by the sides, careful not to touch the painted canvas, and set it down in a disused corner facing the wall. When he went to clean up the mess from the night before, though, he couldn't find any paint on the rug or the chaise beyond what had been there when he arrived, and that puzzled him more than anything. He had woken up in the morning with the dried acrylic caked on his hand and smeared into his jeans, but there was no sign of it in the work room. It was just possible, he decided, that the mysterious Rosa had cleaned it up while he was still upstairs, but he would actually prefer in this case to think it was the supernatural at work. He hated to think he had left a mess for a flesh and blood woman to clean up; he'd rather be crazy. He knew he should work while he waited for Colonel Rhodes to pick him up, but he paced and fretted instead. He tried to remember his classes in college, willing to ruthlessly pillage any material he could find to avoid his class turning to disaster. He had already changed his clothes three times, but his options were extremely limited, and he made some notes that contained a few too many question marks for his liking.

Rhodes had driven a different, more sedate car this time, and Steve felt a twinge of guilt that it was because of him, and his bad knee, that Rhodes had not taken out his beloved 80s monstrosity. Steve still heard it coming down the drive long before he arrived, and he was waiting on the porch when Rhodes pulled up in the staid and responsible sedan. The paint looked black, but when Steve got close he saw it sparkled with flecks of deep cherry red where the sun hit it, and he smiled a little. He sank into the passenger seat, as deep and plush with padding as a recliner, and pulled his cane in after him.

"Afternoon," Rhodes said. "Eager to get going?"

"Absolutely," Steve said with false confidence. He faced forward and fastened his seatbelt as though he couldn't wait. Anxiety bunched up in his shoulders, but overall he found he was looking forward to getting away from the house and all its weirdness for an afternoon.

"Has the work been going well?" Rhodes asked. Maybe he wanted to come in, Steve thought, and see what I've been working on. Rhodes didn't push, however. He turned the big car in the drive and started back up, toward Mount Olive and the land of the living.

"It's been a slow start," Steve hedged. "I'm still sketching, trying to come up with a plan for what I want to do." Not a lie, he thought. Not quite. "There are more distractions out here than I would have thought," he said, and Rhodes' eye twitched, just a flicker.

"Really. What sort of distraction did you find?" Rhodes' voice was carefully, even frighteningly, neutral. He knows, Steve thought. He knows about the house.

"I'm used to the city," he said. "And I know you said not to, but I keep thinking about the Stark Mansion up on the hill." Rhodes relaxed, but not entirely. Not telling him about the ghosts, Steve thought. Not yet, anyway. "Plus I met the caretaker last night," he offered. Let Rhodes think he was lonely, unused to so much space and quiet, not that he found the house not quite lonely enough.

"Thor," Rhodes said, and pursed his lips in disapproval. "He's not supposed to bother the artist in residence, but he loves to talk. Don't let him disturb you."

"He said he needed to winterize the house early, because of a storm."

"Might even be true," Rhodes said, with a trace of sadness. "He loves that house."

"It doesn't seem like it would keep him occupied," Steve said. He couldn't come right out and ask Rhodes to spill the tea, but maybe he would say more if Steve didn't pry.

"He owns a brewery nearby," Rhodes said. "Valhalla Brewing Company. But he has a job at the Stark Foundation for as long as he wants it, so he putters around the house making sure it's kept up."

"The Stark Foundation seems to have an unusual recruitment strategy," Steve joked. Rhodes laughed and let his guard down some as the countryside glided by outside the windows and Mount Olive came into view.

"The last Stark to live here was a good friend of mine," Rhodes said. "And of Thor's. You might have heard the story. It's old news and I don;t like to talk about it. But when Tony- I mean Anthony Stark- died, he left his friends taken care of. He left me the car you saw when I picked you up, and he roped me into this job as an art critic. Thor he left some financial stuff, which I nearly had to physically force him to accept, and he tried to leave him the lake house. Stane and his pack of lawyers managed to keep the property as part of the main mansion, but he signed something saying Thor could still have access to it. So he pretty much comes with the house at this point, and sometimes he drops by to visit the artist in residence even though he knows he's not supposed to."

"I don't want to get him in trouble," Steve said. "We're supposed to have dinner together."

"He's a good cook, though he has a limited repertoire. Heavy on the meat. And don't worry. I don't have the authority to sack him, I don't think, and I wouldn't even if I did just to deny Obadiah Stane the satisfaction." Every time he said the name of Obadiah Stane, Steve could hear venom dripping from the words. They rode the rest of the way into town in a companionable silence, Rhodes seeming far away, lost in thought. Was Anthony Stark the spirit he sensed in the house? He vaguely recalled his death in the news when Steve was in high school. It had been scandalous, maybe a suicide he thought. Nancy Grace did a thing on it. Had he actually died at the house? Steve thought he'd died in New York City, but he didn't really know anything about it. He wouldn't ask Rhodes, not yet, but maybe Thor would know. They pulled into town and slowed in what passed for traffic in Mount Olive, sitting at a red light a block from the community center where he was supposed to teach that day.

"Do you remember an artist named Maggie Partridge?" Steve asked. He'd nearly forgotten to ask. Finding her journal felt so long ago.

"She was a former recipient of the fellowship," Rhodes said. His eyes never left the red light and he kept his tone flat. "Why?"

"I found one of her old sketchbooks," Steve admitted. "I wondered what happened to her."

"Nothing happened to her," Rhodes snapped, then visibly back himself down. "What I mean is, she was a troubled woman. Unfortunately, her health took a turn for the worse while she was staying at the lake, and she had to cut her stay short." Steve just looked a question at Rhodes, pleading without words for more detail. He rolled his eyes and finished: "She stopped taking her meds and started hallucinating. She became paranoid, she kept calling the cops saying someone was trying to get into the house, and it escalated to the point she had to be hospitalized. It was sad. She was a talented woman, and I liked her."

"Was?" Steve said. The light changed and Rhodes stomped on the gas, lurching them forward.

"She still is, probably. We didn't keep in touch after she tried…after she went to the hospital."

"Do you know what she was afraid of?"

"She was sick," Rhodes said. "She knew some of the history and it worked on her mind. If it hadn't been the Stark tragedy, she would have seen something else."

"She saw what, ghosts?" Steve could already tell she had. He could understand why other people thought she was nuts, but he couldn't dismiss her fears so easily. He had walked in her shoes, and in some ways he was still on that path.

"There are no ghosts," Rhodes said with great conviction. "None. Bad things happen, senseless awful things, and they echo down the years, but that's nothing to do with supernatural bullshit. I might as well say they will tell you the stories in town, and there's nothing I can do about that. The Starks were a big deal here, and people talk. But they won't hear it from me. My friend deserves justice, and to be left in peace."

"I'm sorry," Steve said.

"It's fine," Rhodes said. "I get it. You get curious. Just remember that it's not ghost stories and gossip to everyone around here. Have a good class. They won't bite. I'll be by the house later this week to see your progress, but don't worry about it. It's not formal. Let me know if you need anything." Steve understood he was dismissed and he climbed out of the car, flexing his knee and swallowing the pain. He carried his cane, but he didn't want to use it. He could still walk, and he still had his pride.

The classroom they had arranged for him looked disturbingly like the work room at the house. It had probably been a parlor of some kind when the building had been a stately home, and now it drowsed in the afternoon sun. Tiny sun motes hovered in the light and the deep colors in the oriental rug shone like jewels against the dark wooden floors. Six easels were set up around a cheap faux marble Corinthian pillar. A drape of musty looking velvet sat on the top of the pillar, and cradled in its folds was the promised white bowl full of wax lemons. He scrunched the fabric in his hands and fussed with the bowl, trying without success to add even a tiny bit more interest to the composition. It was no use; wax fruit was wax fruit. His students, when they began to arrive, paid no attention to it at all.

There were five of them, all women, and older than he'd expected. He'd been picturing high school students for some reason, or maybe college kids. Even people his own age seemed unbelievably young to him since he'd gone to war, on the other side of some unfathomable vastness of life experience that separated him from them. Three of them were old enough to be his mother, he thought, though much sturdier that she had ever been, retirees with their hair set in curls and tinted blue in an old fashioned style. The fourth had librarian glasses and an intelligent smile, and they all seemed to know each other and expect to find the whole group here. Steve greeted them as they came and left them to settle in. The hum of their footsteps, their chatter and breathing and general shuffle, washed over him and faded to an indistinct background noise. He forgot about the class he was supposed to teach and stared out the window, where golden leaves rained down in the wind. The lake didn't lurk beyond the trees here, but he could feel it as though it were present, as thought the metallic scent of it carried over the mundane smells of paint and dust in the room.

The last woman arrived and she caught Steve's attention, pulling him away from thoughts of the Starks and their house. He would guess she was about the same age as Colonel Rhodes, tall and square shouldered with her iron and brunette hair pulled back into a brutally tight bun. The way she moved, and the piercing sharpness of her grey eyes, formed a connection with him. She had to be military, or ex military, he thought. She wore normal, sensible clothes for a sunny autumn weekend, but she moved like she was used to a having a gun on her. Their eyes met, and although she gave little away, he thought she was surprised by him. They nodded a greeting to each other and an understanding passed between them. The other students greeted her with more restraint than they'd shown with each other, not unfriendly but cautious. The antique clock in the hallway chimed three, and all five of them turned to him expectantly. Here goes nothing, he thought. He remembered Rhodes' warning him on the day he arrived that the real appeal of these classes was him, as a new and novel mystery for the locals. It was like going to a hot new restaurant and then realizing he was on the menu.

"Hi," he began. His skin crawled from the weight of their eyes on him, curious and probing. "I'm Steven Rogers. Call me Steve. Welcome to An Introduction to Landscapes." He reached the end of the sentence and stopped. They were still staring at him, and those three sentences were all he had prepared. If he'd thought of anything else to say, it had vanished without a trace from his mind. He stepped into the conversational equivalent of a mine field and asked, "Does anyone have any questions?"

"Do we have to do the lemons again?" The lady with the librarian glasses asked. The three older women snickered and the brunette rolled her eyes.

"I…" Steve looked at the sad, dusty lemons. "Do you want to use the lemons?" he asked.

"No," they said at once. Steve decided that he liked them. He was still scared of them a little, but he liked them. He sat on one of the stools and tried to relax and not look like he was expecting them to attack.

"We won't, then. What are your names?"

"I'm Brenda," said the librarian lady. "That's Marcy, Mary, and Patricia," she added, pointing to the three older women, who nodded and grinned in turn. "And that's Detective Madigan."

"Please, Brenda. It's my day off. Call me Kylie," she said. A cop. That would explain it. And in no way keep her from being ex military. She didn't look like Kylie, but he wasn't going to say that. She probably already knew.

"Welcome, ladies. So if we don't do the lemons, what do you want to do?"

"Haven't you done this before?" one of them asked. He thought it was Marcy. Patricia and Mary looked mortified and tried to apologize to him with only their eyes.

"No, I haven't," he said. "I've never taught before, and I wasn't sure what I should do. Art is hard enough to do, much less teach." He led them through a basic warm up and prepped their palettes, stalling for time, but they had all obviously worked with paint before and it didn't take long before he was back where he started, eager stares and blank canvases.

"Now what?" Patricia asked. A fair question.

"What do you want to paint?" Steve asked. "We have a nice color scheme laid out that would work for a lot of things."

"What do you like to paint?" Mary asked.

"Yes, tell us about your work," Marcy said. Steve picked up on a conspiracy brewing between them, and he thought he could guess where they were headed, but he had no idea how to stop it.

"We tried to look you up," Brenda said. "But we couldn't find your work anywhere."

"I haven't shown it before," Steve admitted.

"Are you taking inspiration from the local scenery?" She asked, which should not have felt like a loaded question but it did.

"The fall colors are nice," he said, aware of how lame that sounded.

"What about the lake?" Brenda said. "Or the house?"

"Have you seen anything?" Patricia asked. The four of them leaned in close, scenting blood, and even Detective Madigan looked curious. Steve's instinct had him tracking the distance to the door, but he kept calm.

"I'm not sure what you mean, ladies. It's a lovely spot, of course, but there's not much to see out there."

"Go ahead and tell him, Brenda," Detective Madigan said. "There's no point in being coy about it." Brenda glared at her for a second, then turned on a bright smile and pulled something out of her bag. Steve's heart jumped in his chest waiting for a weapon that his rational mind knew she wouldn't have in her handbag.

"I'm part of the New England Paranormal Research Association," she said. She handed him a crisp business card with the name and a website printed on glossy paper with a stock photo ghost. "We've heard so much about Stark's Pond, and we've requested permission to investigate at the house. I'd love to hear about any experiences you've had there."

"You've also been constantly denied permission," Kylie pointed out. "And no one is suicidal enough to try any B&E that close to Obadiah Stane's mansion, because there's things much scarier than ghosts in those woods. Like his freaky bodyguard, to start with."

"Yes, Kylie," Brenda said, with a sarcastic emphasis on her given name. "Between Stark Industries and the Stark Foundation, there's enough smoke and mirrors to make a lot of truth disappear out there. Still, he could tell us if he's had any personal experiences. Off the record, of course."

"Off the record means she puts the whole story on her blog without your name attached but there's enough personal detail to identify you anyway," Kylie warned.

"I remember when Mister Howard died," Patricia said. Her eyes gleamed and her whole face lit up; there was no way to escape hearing her tell this story except to physically flee, and Steve could tell the rest of the room had heard this multiple times before. "You could see the red light and the column of smoke all the way in town. By the time the fire truck got through the gate, they couldn't even get close enough to put it out. They had to wait until it burned down. I used to date one of the guys on the fire squad, and he said all they found of them were burnt teeth and that enormous diamond she used to wear. Pulled it out with tongs because it was so hot, scrubbed the soot off and it was just like new. The driver was still alive, but they couldn't save him. I heard his legs melted, but he still called for help."

"Thank goodness their son wasn't there to see it. Can you imagine?"

"He probably did it, you mean."

"Oh, Marcy, not that again. You never liked him because he didn't come to your daughter's Bat Mitzvah and fall in love with her or something. He was away at school, and just a kid. And they all say he was never the same."

"Of course he wouldn't be, after something like that. And he did send her flowers with a nice note," Marcy said, but she didn't seem convinced.

"Everyone knows it was terrorists that got them. Russians, probably, because they wanted uranium."

"And then the way the son died. So sad."

"He did it to himself, but they bought off the coroner to say it was an accident so they could still collect on his estate."

"Not the way I heard it. He wasn't alone out there that night, I'd bet you anything."

"Tony Stark never had to sleep alone if he didn't want to."

"Thor Odinson did it, I'll bet. You know everyone says they had a thing, and then Tony was running around with that little redhead, and then he's dead and she's gone? I'll bet it was just a lover's triangle."

"I heard they found him naked," Mary said, an excited flush in her cheeks as she joined in. "I heard the fish had already started on his eyes."

Steve didn't like them anymore. He was having a hard time following the conversation, but his participation was not required; these were clearly well worn stories brought out on occasion like a set of nice china. He couldn't keep track of who "they" were in each theory or reported fact, but it hardly mattered. If pressed, he doubted they could tell him either, but they all knew "they" were real.

"They still see him," Brenda told Steve. "They still see all three of them, I think. People have called in to report a fire or an explosion and there's never anything there, and I know some of the artists I've talked to have said they felt Tony Stark in the house. One of them told me she heard footsteps at all hours, and something trying to open the doors. Something was always watching her, and she wouldn't go near the lake for anything. And of course there was poor Maggie." They all nodded solemnly. "It drove her nuts, you know, and no one believed her except for me."

"He died at the house?" Steve asked. He thought that was likely, but he hadn't been able to confirm it.

"Oh yes," Brenda said. She drew a breath, but Patricia interrupted her.

"I'll bet Mr. Odinson found him in the sack with that intern, and something happened. That's why he keeps to himself so much now. He used to be so friendly, but now the guilt is eating him. He found the body in the lake."

"Are all of you done with the bullshitting yet?" Detective Madigan said. They all fell silent and looked at her like she was the bartender at last call, mostly resentful but also hopeful for something. "You know 95% of everything you just said is a load of crap without a shred of proof. If someone killed him, why were there no marks on his body?"

"Are you finally going to tell us, then?" Patricia said. "Set us straight. You saw more of it than anyone else."

"I can't tell you anything else even if I wanted to, which I don't. Tony Stark was brilliant and troubled, and he took his own life, whether he meant to or not. If you want to pester Steve here to tell you about every time he's walked through a cold spot living in an old house in New England in the fall, and he'll let you, go ahead, but for now I came to paint something and my palette is drying out." Chastened, the other four looked away from each other and from him for a moment, fussing with their paints and rearranging things to cover the silence.

"Why don't I show you my own technique?" Steve said. "I've been working on something, like an emotional landscape," he cringed at his description, but he kept going. "I…came back, recently. From Afghanistan. It's helping me process what I saw to paint the place as I remember it." He saw more questions come into their eyes, now that they were thinking about him, as a person, rather than just a chance to get more information on the local mystery. "So think of someplace that you want, or maybe need, to go, and let's paint." He turned to his easel and tried to do what he'd just described. He wouldn't do Afghanistan, not in front of an audience, so he chose to go back to Brooklyn, back to his childhood, and try to capture what it had been like. It was a way to touch Bucky without remembering only how he died. His students talked among themselves for a few minutes, but he tuned them out, and soon the room fell into a busy but quiet peace.

He felt that he should be making some sort of instructional comments while they worked, but that wasn't how he did things. He started to paint the tree that had been outside their apartment building as a kid, above the Jewish deli that always smelled like corned beef and pastrami that they couldn't afford. Their downstairs neighbor sometimes brought them leftovers, odd cuts and trimmings that "would have gone to waste" but tasted amazing. When Steve got back from the hospital after his meningitis, he had brought Steve's mother soup twice a week, and Steve had seen the man's dead parents and siblings huddled close around him, bound to him by his loneliness and grief. With the cruelty of a feverish child, he had asked the man about his dead, and learned for the first time how a person could be haunted, even separated by so much distance and time.

He let his hands keep going, but he was no longer thinking about Brooklyn, or Afghanistan. The spirit in the lake had a name now- Tony Stark. Even allowing for a huge margin of bullshit and rumor, the lone fact shone out: a man had died at the house, and his body had been found floating in the lake. He hadn't made contact with Steve the way ghosts usually did, but his presence was stronger than any other spirit he'd encountered. His death was bleeding into Steve, into his art and his dreams, and the sad damaged remnants of his life were all around him as well, in Rhodes' anger, Thor's sadness, and Brenda's morbid curiosity. And the mansion on the hill that bore his name, but belonged to someone else. He'd never gone looking for a ghost before, so he didn't know if he could do something to draw Stark's spirit closer, make it more able to communicate. Even if he could, that didn;t mean ho should. If the story of Maggie Partridge had any truth to it, the haunting was capable of harming living people. Suicides were the hardest ghosts to help. He'd encountered a sadly large number of them in New York, and for all that the chance meeting upset him, he had never been able to give any of them peace. Some ghosts had a message, or a desire for justice, or a secret they kept, and most were only a kind of memory, but those who had taken their own life were seeking something forever beyond their reach, to the point they weren't usually even aware of him. Could he do anything to help Tony Stark?

"What's going on here?" Colonel Rhodes' voice cut through the fog of his thoughts and Steve came back to the present with a start. Looking around, he wasn't the only one. All of his students were blinking in confusion. Patricia rubbed her forehead between her eyes, heedless of the paint she was smearing on her face, and Brenda stared at her palette with fear. Rhodes stood in the door, his face flat with anger and shock. Steve looked at his own canvas. He could see where he had started, just barely, with the tree from his childhood, but the lurking blackness of Stark's Pond dominated the canvas, menacing and hungry, and the vague impressions of trees and the dock were done in shades of bruised purple and bloody red. Steve wanted to explain, but he saw the same image repeated on all the canvasses in the room. Though rendered in different color schemes and vantage points, all of them had painted Stark's Pond. Something menacing, amorphous and dark emerged from the water in Brenda's, Mary had a corpse in her lake, its pathetic nakedness picked out in detail despite her limited skill. Even Detective Madigan seemed puzzled by her painting, a striking composition of the lake at sunrise, fluttering yellow crime scene tape criss crossing the foreground. The silence stretched and no one offered any explanation.

"We were capturing a remembered or imagined landscape," Detective Madigan offered. "I guess we all chose the same one."

"I didn't mean to…" Steve started to say. He had no way to explain it. He hadn't meant to paint the lake and he'd thought that away from the house he would be able to do something else. Had the others followed his lead?

"Brenda was telling us all about it before class started," Kylie continued. "Weren't you?"

Brenda hardly reacted to her name at all, still staring at her crime scene painting with confusion that was turning into fear. She nodded, absently, and began hurriedly packing her supplies.

"I was trying to paint my grandparent's Christmas tree farm," Mary said. "In Vermont. I didn't paint this."

"Well, time's up," Rhodes said. His voice was as hard and flat as his eyes, and despite the sincere confusion he clearly didn't believe that they had all painted the same thing without instruction or even conscious awareness. Rhodes started to speak again, but thought better of it. He turned and left without another word, and Steve's face burned with guilt. His students packed and fled in silence as well, and none of them took their paintings, until it was just him and Detective Madigan in the room.

"Maybe I should have gone with the lemons after all," Steve said.

"Maybe," she agreed, cracking a smile.

"That's a nice piece you started, " Steve said. "The composition is great."

"Thanks," she said. "It was supposed to be a night market I went to in Baghdad." She went back to packing her supplies, and there didn't seem anything else to say.

"That was…"

"Weird? Has that ever happened before?" She looked at Steve intently, as if he were suddenly in an interview room in a police station.

"Sort of," he admitted. She'd know if he lied. "I have had some…experiences at the house." She nodded as if she'd expected as much. Then she looked at the door, and back to him.

"Do you want a ride back?"

"I guess I do," he said. He wasn't sure when, or if, Rhodes would be back for him.

Kylie led him out to her white Crown Victoria, which could not have looked more like a police car if it had had the lights and markings on it. It was an older car, but it was scrupulously clean. Once the doors were shut and they both had on seat belts, she backed out of the community center and began without preamble.

"So what have you seen out there?"

"You won't believe me," he said. "It sounds crazy."

"Try me. it's a twenty minute drive. What do you have to lose?"

"I started seeing dead people when I was seven."

"OK."

"I was in the hospital with meningitis for two weeks, and at one point I think I almost died. When I woke back up, they were there. Wait, did you say 'OK'?"

"I believe you," she said with a shrug.

"You do?"

"I don't think you're lying," she said. "And you aren't any crazier than anyone else who's been in combat. Besides, you aren't the only one."

"I've seen him, I think. Tony Stark. He was in the lake. and there have been footsteps and things moving in the house, and every time I try to paint, I end up doing the lake instead."

"It followed you into town, then?"

"I think so."

"None of that shit Brenda and the others were telling you about it was true, except it did happen. Tony Stark died out there, and Colonel Rhodes was a friend of his."

"Did he kill himself?" Steve asked. Kylie sighed.

"It looked that way. There were no marks on the body. Toxicology found alcohol and heroin in his blood, and he was a known user. No note. The coroner did rule it an accident because there was no note, but either way it looked like he relapsed and ended up drowning."

"That must be hard for Colonel Rhodes to accept."

"He never did accept it, is the thing," she said. "He fought it at every step. He insisted there had been foul play involved, to the point where I think it hurt his career. I can't blame him, because he's right about one thing. There are some unanswered questions, a few loose ends."

"All suicides leave unanswered questions."

"That's true. But even if you accept everything about the scene, the girl is still missing."

"What girl?" Steve said. He thought of the red haired figure he had seen briefly in the woods.

"Stark had a young assistant. Virginia Potts, aka Pepper. She drove out of Stark Industries headquarters on the day he died, and rather than come back here, she apparently went straight to the airport, boarded a flight to London, and vanished. We were able to determine that her passport had turned up in Rome, but no one has seen her since that I could confirm."

"Were they really sleeping together?" Steve asked.

"No. I don't think so, at least. That was the rumor, but no one could really prove it, and neither of them ever admitted to a sexual relationship. She was this gorgeous redhead. She could have been a fashion model, but she had a head for business. Stark brought her in a year or two before he died, when he seems to have stopped fully trusting his godfather, Stane. He wanted somebody who wasn't linked to them, someone he chose himself, but of course the rest of the world thinks he must have her around for sex. I think she got caught up in something, personally, but we had to give it to INTERPOL and we never heard another thing about it."

"What about Thor?"

"I don't think they were sleeping together either," she said. "Maybe when they were younger. But Thor was like his unofficial bodyguard."

"I meant, do you think he had something to do with it?"

"No. I saw him that morning. I questioned him before it all got taken out of our hands. He was devastated. I think he might know more than he ever admitted about what went on that night, but I don't think he had anything to do with him dying. I can't really blame him for keeping his mouth shut, either. Misfortune seems to follow people who cross Obadiah Stane."

"Did he cover it up or something?"

"Of course. That investigation was over before it even started. Stark Industries immediately started to obstruct every angle they could, claiming Tony Stark had been involved with matters of national security. They were happy to accept that he died of a tragic and possibly intentional overdose, have a big hypocritical memorial service, start some charities in his name, and then act like he never existed. I don't think we'll ever know what happened unless someone starts talking, and I'm not holding my breath."

"You said I wasn't the first," Steve said. "What did you mean?"

"Have you heard about Maggie Partridge? Besides what the Scooby Gang told you in class?"

"She lived in the house before I did. I found one of her sketchbooks."

"She was a friend of mine. Really talented. The house drove her crazy. She always said she was never alone out there, that someone was trying to get her. It wasn't Tony she was worried about. She became obsessed with the disappearance of Pepper Potts. Her last night there, I checked in on her and found her totally divorced from reality, about a minute away from drowning herself in the lake or throwing herself on the electric fence around the mansion.”

Kylie’s knuckles went white on the wheel and she kept her eyes on the road. Her jaw clenched so hard it quivered, and she swallowed hard to keep the memory under control.

“ Once she got out of the institution, she started a blog about it. Called Apparitions. Originally it was just her rambling about the one disappearance, but as she got better mentally and improved her research methods, it became a quite thorough investigation and catalogue of evidence. She and I don't communicate much anymore, for her health, but last I heard the thing had really taken off and now she investigates missing women all over the country. I think it even has a podcast now. People forget about the Potts case, or they only know about it in relation to the Stark death, but Maggie never saw Tony. It was Pepper she saw, but it was Stane she was really afraid of."

"Why tell me about it?"

"Normally I wouldn't. If you were happily painting away in that house, I'd leave it be. Let you make what you would of the rumors. It's almost impossible to spend any time around here in the autumn and not hear more than you would ever want to know about the whole thing. But if it's getting to you, get out. The Starks are dead, Pepper is presumed dead at this point, Thor and Rhodes have both suffered for their proximity, and Stane is as dangerous as ever. You can't change any of that, and I don't want anyone else to end up like Maggie. She's lucky to be alive." Steve was surprised to see they were already pulling down the drive to the house. The twenty minutes had passed quickly.

"What about you, Did you ever see anything out here?"

"Just the scene. It still haunts me, even without any ghosts. It was so quiet. I'll keep it with me forever, you know. Some scenes stay with you. I think you understand."

"Yeah," Steve agreed. He still had questions about the day Bucky died, and he understood he was never going to have answers for them.

"Well, here you are. Are you going to be OK out here?"

"Sure," he said.

"Thanks for the class, then. Are you doing another one next month?"

"If I don't get kicked out."

"I don't think he'll kick you out, even if he thinks you just did it in poor taste. I'll talk to him and see if I can smooth it over."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I'll buy him a drink. And then I'll blame the whole thing on Brenda. They don't get on."

"I appreciate it. Thanks for the ride."

"No trouble."

"And the warning, I suppose."

"You be careful. Stick with the lemons next time."

"You got it."

Once her tail lights disappeared up the drive, Steve went into the house. Silence lay over the rooms, and it was cool and dark in the failing sunlight. He kicked his feet up on the chaise and shut his eyes to the lake,. Being with other people had left him feeling more alone than ever out here, and he hoped Thor would be on time for dinner.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

He heard Thor's bike coming several minutes before Thor arrived. He stepped out on the front porch as Thor stowed his helmet and pulled two parcels out of the voluminous saddle bags.

"Steve! Good to see you!" Thor said with a genuine smile. The fading daylight made his hair shine gold and picked out the creases worn into his face.

"Hey, Thor. Glad you could make it." Steve tried to match his smile, because he meant it.

They made small talk while Thor lit the grill, and the heat of the fire kept off the worst of the chill from the falling dusk. Thor unwrapped one of the packages to reveal two large steaks, flecked with salt and pepper and some other seasoning, and soon they were sizzling over the coals. Steve didn't remember the last time he'd had a steak. Probably when he'd been promoted to captain, and that was years before.

"How do you like your steak?" Thor asked. 

"Medium," Steve said. "Medium rare, actually."

"Yes, good," Thor agreed. Steve went inside to raid the fridge and found a tub of pasta salad that looked like it would work. He brought it out with plates and silverware.

"Bring out glasses," Thor said, grinning. "I brought you something special." Steve went back and got two plain pint glasses and brought them out as well, just as Thor was laying a slab of sirloin on his plate.

"Let it rest a moment," Thor said. "Look." He unwrapped the larger box he'd brought and pulled out two large, unlabelled growlers. The dark amber glass caught golden glints in the dregs of sunlight.

"Beer?" Steve asked.

"Indeed. The best I've brewed yet," Thor said. "If I do say so myself."

"Colonel Rhodes mentioned you owned a brewery," Steve said.

"Rhodey is too kind," Thor said, but he seemed pleased. "Valhalla Brewing has a mighty name, but little else as yet. I am the proprietor and sole employee most of the time, and I don't distribute much beyond a few local festivals. Most of it- well, beer is for family and friends, and a man gets tired of drinking alone." Steve didn't drink much himself, never had, but he wouldn't refuse the offer. Thor popped one open and poured with flourish, a deep golden brown brew with a heavy foam. It didn't smell like the cheap cans and bottles he remembered from college- it smelled like summer, he thought, like sunlight and honey and herbs. He handed the first glass to Steve and poured another for himself. "There you are," he announced. "You are the first to taste this batch besides the brewmaster himself." He raised his drink and knocked glasses with Steve, careful not to spill any. "To art?" he toasted.

"I'll drink to that," Steve agreed. The beer was fabulous, sweet and strong with a biting finish. Thor watched his reaction, and although Steve stifled a cough, he smiled. "That's got a kick," he said. "Like expensive scotch."

"Yes," Thor agreed. He was clearly pleased with Steve's review, and he started cutting his steak. He raised a big, dripping bite to his mouth, and just before he took it he asked, "How did your class go?"

"Oh," Steve said while Thor chewed, "I'm surprised it's not all over town," Steve said.

"It might be," Thor agreed. "But no one would have told me about it."

"I think everyone got their money's worth," he said. Thor dropped it and they ate in silence for a few minutes. Steve complimented the beer again, and the steaks, and Thor let him steer the conversation as they drank the rich pints.

"Has the house been to your liking?" Thor asked. Steve could feel the buzz of the beer starting to build already, and Thor refilled his glass.

"I find I keep painting the lake," Steve admitted.

"Ah, yes, the lake. Very picturesque, the lake."

"My whole class ended up doing it," he admitted. "Colonel Rhodes isn't best pleased with me, I think."

"Rhodey will forgive you," Thor assured him. "He's forgiven far worse than curiosity."

"I mean, I hadn't planned to do it." He probed Thor with hints. If anyone would know about the place, it would be the caretaker, the spirit's old friend.

"Well," Thor said. His piercing blue eyes bored right into Steve, begging for truth. "The lake has a way of getting into you. It's atmospheric. Haunting, some would say."

"I heard some crazy stories about it in town."

"I don't doubt that you did," Thor said. "Did they tell you to keep away from me? That I'm a killer?" There was such deep bitterness in his voice when he said it. "Or is that rumor out of fashion at the moment?"

"I don't mean to pry," Steve said, though he did, at least a little. "I've just been trying to find out about this place. I heard some bad stuff went down here. I don't think you're a murderer, for whatever that's worth." He took a pull of beer, but he went slowly. Thor was already into a third, and had opened the second growler. "I know you take care of the place. Did you really know the family?" Thor's shoulders fell, and he looked out over the water.

Steve realized that by asking the question, he had demanded the heart in Thor's chest, touching something much more intimate than he'd meant it to be. Thor paused, drew a breath, and handed his heart over.

"I did know the family," he began. "I boast I was almost part of it. Maria and Howard, and their son, Tony. Tony and I went to school together. My parents thought I would learn better if I went out of country, where my face was not well known, and Tony was my roommate. He was several years ahead in school, and he probably should have been been further ahead. But there he was, 13 and running rings around boys who were three or more years his seniors, even the professors. And they all knew who his family was, as well. They knew his father was one of the wealthiest men in the world because he was a genius with weapon systems, a self-made man, and despite what my parents wanted they knew I was foreign royalty. They were anywhere from totally indifferent to him to brutally cruel."

"But you weren't, were you?" Steve asked. He couldn't imagine Thor mistreating a kid- but who knew with teenagers?

"No. I befriended him. I made it clear to his tormentors that they had to deal with me, and they mostly left him alone after that, or became friendly. Tony hated it, of course. He always had a fierce desire, a need, to be liked for himself that made it hard for him to trust. He did not want friends or lovers because of his money or his genius or his connections, and that eliminated a lot of people. He would take me home for holiday breaks when things were rocky at home, and his mother welcomed me like her own son."

"What about his father?"

"Not so much. He treated me better than his own son, as he was only polite but distant to me. They never fought in front of me, but I know some of the things he said to Tony." Thor paused again and poured himself some more beer. He drank deeply, looking out over the lake.

"Tony was a good enough son to mourn him, and I was a good enough friend to keep my mouth shut." He drank again and shook his head as if to clear it. "When I fell out with my own family, Tony took me in. I lived in this house for years. Tony always kept the projects he was working on out here, and I happened to be a human one."

"You used to live here?" Steve repeated. He had a hard time imagining anyone else living in this house, people with lives ahead of them, talking and laughing and arguing here. This house was frozen in time, and whatever had happened here still lingered.

"Here," Thor said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a worn but expensive leather wallet and flipped it open to show Steve a small photograph with a lightning strike of old, smoothed creases. The wallet had other photo sleeves, all empty. Steve caught a tantalizing glimpse of a second picture, a hair thin border around the first, doubled up in the same sleeve, present but hidden.

"That's us," he said. He held the photo in the light and a finger of shock ran down Steve's spine, cold as a rivulet of lake water. A younger Thor, smiling and laughing, had a protective, possessive arm around a familiar dark haired man. There was no point in doubting it, as tantly, more with his soul than his eyes, or whatever sense he had that let him see the dead in the first place. Although he had only seen the face in the lake for the briefest of instants, he knew it intimately. The young man in the photo stood easy, a confident grin on his face that said he was the one who'd made Thor laugh, but his dark eyes held hidden depths, as though he were in pain.yes and he sat back, stowing the picture away.

"That's right,"Thor said. "It was all over the news. He died here," he said, and he nodded toward the lake. "It will be ten years ago in a few weeks." Thor clearly expected him to ask for the story, or to fill in what he'd heard, but Steve didn't. He wasn't sure he wanted to know any more about the dead man in his house. They sipped beer in companionable silence and watched the sun set over the trees. The red sky reflected in the water and the trees shook and rustled in the wind. Sunset brought a clear bite to the rising wind, but neither of them moved to go inside, insulated from the chill by alcohol and memories.

"They never got him right," Thor said when there was nothing but a sliver of purple above the trees. The porch light came on behind them, throwing Thor's face into silhouette. Thor spoke as part of a ritual, one Steve had seen in variations in therapy groups and funerals many times, a need to tell a story, to bring a friend back to life for a few minutes and make him live in a stranger's mind, a private and powerful haunting. Steve nodded, his permission the only participation needed from him.

"The news," Thor continued. "They made him what they wanted to see. They told stories about him, but they never knew him. To them, he was ratings gold, American royalty, the genius son of a self-made millionaire. They ate it up when he was opening a hospital or throwing a first pitch, but they loved it even more when he got arrested for drug possession, when he was seen with three different supermodels in a week, when he was involved in a fight or a drunken drag race. When he was self-destructing."

"He was entertainment," Steve said.

“Yes,” Thor agreed. “They didn’t have to think of him as a real person. Even his family often didn’t act like that. He was loyal to a fault, and generous, and his mind went a mile a minute, but people hurt him, easily. He had a few people he could trust, but in the end, I think he was always lonely. He died alone, and that is what I really can’t forgive myself for. I had to leave him once before, and I promised I wouldn’t do it again.”

  
  
  


"What happened?" Steve asked. In spite of himself, he was curious. This was the longest conversation he'd had outside of therapy since... well, since Bucky died.

"I got called home," Thor said. "And my father... convinced me to serve in our military. A family tradition, you could say."

"How did you feel about it?" Steve asked.

"Ambivalent. I wanted to please my father, and he wasn't too impressed with my American education. He wanted me away from Tony, I think, and he wanted me to grow up and be like him. So I went, and I changed. I never saw combat," Thor said. "But I learned to fight. I didn't notice at the time but they were teaching me to kill if I needed to, without any hesitation."

"Did something go wrong?"

"Not at all. I finished a distinguished but uneventful tour and I went home, but I didn't know what I was doing there anymore. I showed up in the news and sat through meetings with my father, and I was bored. Then my younger brother graduated from college and we went out to celebrate."

"Are you close?"

"We were," Thor said. "We did everything together as kids. I missed him. Tony always thought I remembered it less complicated than it really was, and he was right, but I swear he was glad to see me too." Thor sighed and took a drink, preparing for the meat of the story.

"So we had dinner, reminisced, had a few drinks, and Loki- that's my brother- said we should play the game."

"The game?"

"We used to do it all the time when we were together as teenagers. He'd figure out a way to get us free of our escort, and I'd find a way for us to get into someplace we weren't supposed to. I was old enough to know better, even if he wasn't, and I wasn't that drunk, either, but he always could convince me to do whatever he wanted. He got me to play. It was harder to get away from our security as adults, but we did, and we ended up in a rougher part of town, both much too drunk to be smart, and we were out of money but still drinking. Loki had this thing he liked to do where he would pick a fight with the biggest guy he could find and then step back to watch when I'd protect him. He saw this guy shooting pool and that's the one he wanted. Loki could really pick them, I guess, because this guy wasn’t all that big, not compared to me, anyway, but you could see in his eyes he's vicious. Here you would call him a skinhead, maybe, or a Neo Nazi, and Loki acted like he was much more drunk than he really was and made a pass at the guy."

"I was so determined not to get into this time, just let Loki deal with it, but the guy starts throwing fists. Loki ducked his punch and laughed at him and the guy had a knife, out of his boot probably but it felt like out of magic, and two friends who of course came out of the men's room just in time for the guy to call my brother a... Well, it doesn't translate, but something nasty. Loki turned and looked at me and it was like we were teenagers again, no time had passed, and he needed me, so I stepped in. I got about half a sentence out trying to get cooler heads to prevail, but by then the guy had also told his friends what was going on and I..." Thor trailed off and drained his beer.

"I barely remember what happened," he continued, "And that's the truth. I wasn't thinking anymore, I wasn't me. I should say it all went hazy or red, but it was so clear. There was a song on the jukebox and the whole thing, start to finish, was over before the song was. I came back to myself as the last chords played and I had blood in my eyes and a cracked rib, but none of them laid a finger on my brother. Two of them went to the hospital, but the first guy, the one Loki picked out, he was dead. Stabbed with his own knife. It had my prints on it."

"I'm sorry," Steve said, because you had to say something even when there was nothing you could say. Thor nodded a spare acknowledgement of the ritual speech and offered Steve another beer. Steve declined- he'd already had one more than he was comfortable with, and he'd made it a point not to let himself drink since he'd come back. Too many had gone down that road and never come back. Thor shrugged and poured for himself.

"The court said it was self defense," Thor continued. "Everyone said he'd been the one to pull a knife."

"It wasn't your fault," Steve said.

"He wasn't a good man," Thor said. "But he'd be alive today if we hadn't been there. I wasn't welcome at home after it happened. My father took me straight from the courthouse and dropped me off in Oslo. He gave me fifty kroner and my passport, took my wallet and phone, and told me to get out of the car. We were at a bus stop. I did what he said; if he'd demanded I hand over my coat I'd have done it. He said I was a disgrace, and he didn't care where I went but I couldn't come home or talk to my mother or Loki again. I shut the door and he drove away. But not like he was angry, or upset. He was so calm."

"What about your brother, though?" Steve asked. "He started it. Why are you the one left standing on a street corner?"

"My father," Thor said with a sigh, "Thinks that I started the fight. I dragged the family name through the mud and it was Loki who was trying to make sure nothing happened to me." Thor would not meet his eyes and covered it by taking a deep drink.

"Why?" Steve asked, but he thought he already knew.

"Once you get used to protecting someone, it's a hard habit to break," Thor said. He drank again. "I called Tony. It was probably the middle of the night, but he answered. I barely told him what had happened but he took care of everything. He bought me a plane ticket, wired me travel money, met me at the airport. Took me into the city to replace my clothes and got the family solicitor to start the paperwork so I could stay here legally for as long as I wanted. He was nineteen and I was 23. He was out of MIT then and his parents had just died. That was before the worst of the drugs and the drinking, of course, and he adopted me. Moved me in here, in fact. He'd taken over the lake house to work, and I don't think he liked going back to the main house. His parents...Well, Obadiah was living there at the time, and he was happy to leave Tony to his space. Tony was always out here building something, drawing, tinkering, you name it, but I was his first human project."

"Did you ever talk to your family?" Steve asked, but he thought he knew the answer.

"No. I have respected my father's wishes in this matter. I think my mother spoke to Tony once or twice."

"Jesus, Thor. That's awful."

"I am sorry," Thor said. He broke from the reverie he'd been in and focused on Steve, as if he'd forgotten for a moment who he was. "I shouldn't tell you all of that. I only wanted you to know about my friend."

"Hell of a friend."

"Indeed he was. The best I ever had. He was not a perfect man, but I would have done anything for him. I protected him as best as I could, but in the end I failed."

"I'm sure it wasn't your fault," Steve said.

"It's kind of you to say it." Thor stared into the dark void beyond the porch light where the lake lapped at the shore and the trees whispered. He finished his beer and poured another, surprised to find it was the last of it.

"What happened?" Steve asked, his voice gentle in the dark. Thor was a stranger, and a drunk one at that. He ought to call the man a cab, not encourage him to spill secrets out like blood. But there was such a quiet anguish about the big man, such a desperate need for release, and it felt like they had known each other for years rather than hours. Thor drew a breath, but he seemed to feel the connection as well, if that wasn't just the alcohol.

"He died," Thor said. "That's the short answer. He was staying out here, just the two of us and Colonel Rhodes when he could get the time. He was getting clean. His drinking and drug use had landed him in the hospital, and he came out a different man. Clear headed, maybe, with new priorities. He was sober and he was working again, taking an interest in his company, making big plans. He should have kicked me out, because I don't think I was the best influence on him, but I wasn't as bad as some of his...I guess you could call them friends. I stayed with him. I didn't want him to die. But this one night...this one night in November, he called me from Stark Industries headquarters and he said he was staying in town for the night. He asked me to meet him at his hotel. I asked him if he was alone and he said no, but he would be soon, and he asked me to hurry. He sounded so strange, like he was tired or...like he was shaking. I tried to keep him on the phone with me, but he cut the call. It was too late to get the train so I took the bike, almost four hours in the dark and the rain, and when I got to the hotel he wasn't there. Never had been. I went over to Stark Industries and there was some kind of party just starting to break up, and Tony's uncle told me they'd expected him there but he hadn't shown up. I never liked him, and I think he had a low opinion of me, but we were civil to each other for Tony. He called me Tony's guard dog and he always played it off like it was a nickname, just a joke, but I could tell the difference. I put gas in the bike and drove all the way back here. Got here just after sun up and I looked around the house. There was...well, there was an empty syringe, and an open fifth of vodka, but I couldn't find Tony anywhere. Not until I..." Thor trailed off. His eyes were bloodshot and shone with unshed tears in his pale face. His knuckles flexed white where he gripped his mostly empty glass, and his speech had grown heavy and slurred.

"Was he in the lake?" Steve asked. He did not look in the direction of the water.

"Yes," Thor said. "The police said he got drunk, shot up, and he must have fallen in. Must have fallen."

"Is that what you think?" Steve asked. It sounded like Thor thought another scenario was more likely. It was cruel to make Thor say the words, but he wanted to know what kind of spirit was in the water.

"It could have been an accident," Thor said. "He knew if he tried to do that stuff out here I would have stopped him. I would have," Thor insisted. "I would have stopped the whole thing. He'd be alive right now if I had just..." Thor put his face in his hands and slumped over the table. Steve despised himself for pushing him then, and felt he owed him something as close to equal as he could offer.

"I understand how you feel," he admitted. He took Thor's hands and pulled them gently away from his face, gone blotchy red and streaked with tears. Thor, to his credit, did not scoff or act like this was in any way unlikely, only waited, stricken, for Steve's own story.

"I had a friend like Tony growing up. James Buchanan Barnes- Bucky to me. We did everything together. I was a scrawny kid, always shooting my mouth off and getting into fights, and Bucky would be there to make sure I finished them, or at least he got beat up with me. He could make me laugh like no one else, and he treated me like family." Steve realized how rarely he spoke about Bucky aloud anymore, as if afraid it would summon his accusing spirit, but he pressed on.

"I got meningitis when I was seven and missed half a year of school. It took me a long time to come back from it," Steve said. No matter what he'd asked Thor to share or how drunk the man was right now, Steve was not telling him about the ghosts he'd been able to see during his fever or how they'd stayed once it broke. "and then my mom got sick. If it hadn't been for Bucky, I probably wouldn't have finished high school. After graduation, he went into the army and I went to art school. Got a scholarship, even, but I only finished one year. My mom died and I joined the army with him." Thor was listing to one side, but his eyes were focused, and Steve knew he was following the story.

"We were in the same unit. Made it through one entire tour in Iraq, then got sent to Afghanistan. Long story short, we were escorting a convoy, should have been a routine trip. Everything in that sector had been quiet for months. We were alert, but not enough. The driver dropped dead and there was blood all over the windshield before I even heard the shot. The other trucks kept moving, but ours was in the way. I didn’t know which direction would be safe, but we had to move. The convoy wouldn’t wait, that’s just how it had to be. I gave the order. They herded us right off the road into a field of IEDs. Bucky...I heard him call out, and I think he pushed me aside, but then everything went black. I came to and I couldn't hear anything, there was dust in the air and I couldn't breathe and I thought Bucky was OK somehow, I thought he was crouched over me, mouthing something to me but I couldn't hear it. I turned toward him and I saw, though...I think he was dead already. His arm was just gone and his eyes were..."

"Empty," Thor supplied. Steve nodded. He had never been able to tell anyone about that day. He'd spoken of it only once, to Sam, and never to his therapist no matter how she tried. She hadn't, so far as he knew, seen her best friend die. Sam had, and so, more or less, had Thor.

"Yeah. Empty. I passed out in there somewhere and woke up in the hospital. They told me I was lucky to be alive, because most of the others never made it."

"It's a strange sort of luck, to outlive those you were meant to protect," Thor said. He leaned forward and looked at Steve more closely.

"But you saw your friend, you said."

"I thought I did," Steve said. He hadn't meant to include that bit. "But I had a concussion and I was losing blood."

"Have you seen him here?" Thor whispered, and Steve knew he did not mean Bucky.

"Who, the ghost of Tony Stark?"

"I thought you might have...some of the other artists have told me things. About the house. A few have left early, too."

"I haven't seen anything," Steve said, more vehemently than he meant to. Thor sat back and shrugged it off, but something in him closed, and Steve knew he'd hurt him. "It wasn't just Bucky. All those deaths are mine to bear," Steve said.

"I understand," Thor said. "I just...I wish I could see him, talk to him, one more time. There are too many things I never said."

"Thor, he knows. What would you say? That you love him? That you're sorry? He knows."

"And what would you say to your friend? You don't think he knows that about you? I've only known you for a few hours and I can tell. But I should go," Thor said. "It's grown late." He stood and immediately swayed on his feet, steadying himself on the table.

"You shouldn't drive," Steve said.

"It's not far."

"Doesn't matter. Stay here until morning," he offered.

"It gets lonely out here," Thor said. He nodded. "Perhaps you are right. I can sleep in the workroom."

Steve was increasingly glad he had insisted as Thor navigated the short distance down the hall with exaggerated care. He couldn't shake the feeling that if he let the man go off into the deepening night by himself, something would happen, and he didn't need anything else on his conscience. Thor settled gracelessly into the workroom chaise and Steve was struck by how much he belonged there, like the last piece fitted into a puzzle. The chaise seemed to remember him and the room came alive with that feeling again, of a presence that waited just out of sight.

"I used to spend a lot of time here," Thor slurred, already half asleep. "Tony would work and he would tell me whatever he was doing. Never understood more than half of it," he mumbled. "...Night he died...there was...I never understood. I should have..."

"It's OK, Thor," Steve said. He put his hand on Thor's shoulder and the big man came back to himself and settled into the old chaise with a sigh. Part of Steve wanted so much to push, to ask what else Thor had found the night Tony died, because he knew Thor would tell him. It shocked him; he hadn't been interested in anyone's grief for most of a year, not even his own. But it would be wrong to get it out of him like this. He had already learned more of Thor's secrets than he had any right to know, and he had few others of his own to pay with. He gave him another pat on the shoulder and tried to remember the last time he'd touched a living person. It might have been on the subway, he thought, one of the few times he had tried to take it. Thor's breath deepened into soft snores and the dim yellow lamplight brought out the gold in his hair. Steve again sensed something in the room, something not hostile but tense, protective. He could hear quiet scratching and shuffling of a genius at work at the desk behind him, the breath of a man long dead.

Steve refused to spook himself. He left the room without looking directly at anything except the door and ignored any shadows in his peripheral vision. He let routine take his mind, clearing the dishes from the table, making sure the grill was out, and putting the heavy glass growlers on the counter, but he left the dishes in the sink. His drill sergeant wasn't here, after all. He got a few Advils and a chipped tumbler full of water and went back down the hall to the workroom. He'd leave them out for Thor, in case he wanted them later.

He stepped through an icy cold draft of air as he entered the room which prickled the hairs on his arms. The water glass quivered in his hand just enough to ripple the surface, but he refused to startle. He kept walking and left the cold spot behind. A drafty house, he thought. If there's a spirit here, why haven't I seen it?

He set the water on the table next to Thor and froze. Thor did not seem to have moved; if anything, he now snored more deeply than before. But now there was a soft, worn afghan tucked around him, and not only did Steve not know where he got it, he would swear he had never seen it in the house before. Ludicrous, he thought, to be frightened by something so completely innocuous, but he'd never dealt with anything like this. He knew there was a logical explanation, that Thor had lived here before and knew where to find a blanket, but Steve just didn't believe it.

He heard the distinct click of the lamp switch and the room went dark. What had been bizarre but rather endearing in the light became more threatening in its absence. The presence he felt still did not seem hostile, and he knew what it felt like to have hostile eyes watching him, but he was no longer supposed to be in this room. Tony, or whatever it was, did not seem dangerous to his impromptu guest- if anything, it seemed to protect Thor- so Steve left the room and again ignored any shadows that might lurk there.

He dreamed he was in the hospital again, the nauseous sting of a needle in his arm. It pumped him full of cold poison but this time he could look around and saw that the IV was filling his veins with the black metallic water of the lake and then he was numb, aware but paralyzed and he was in the lake itself, drowning in bitter darkness. He wrenched himself awake in the morning silence and choked back a scream because he had wrenched his knee in his struggle, but even through the pain he could tell something was wrong. A sound had woken him, but he wasn't sure what it was. He tried to quiet his ragged panting and listen, refusing to panic, and he heard it again, a loud banging noise that he couldn't place. It could be Thor, he thought, though he didn’t know what he could be doing. He limped down the stairs with his cane, heedless of his pajamas and uncombed hair. The house was cold and clammy with damp, blanketed with an anger he hadn't felt before. He stopped short at the base of the stairs. The workroom door was shut, but as he watched the back door swung open and slammed shut, followed by the crash of shattering glass in the kitchen. Steve gripped his cane and limped toward the kitchen. As soon as he passed it the back door slammed again behind him but he kept going.

The kitchen looked as he had left it the night before, nothing disturbed, except for the two growlers he'd left on the counter. They lay shattered on the floor, almost crushed, bits of the heavy glass gleaming like chunks of amber, and the smell of spilled warm beer filled the room with a sour-sweet stench strong as vomit. Thor skidded into him from behind and Steve caught him, as they were both barefoot. Thor had clearly just woken up, his eyes puffy and red with sleep and confusion. Steve's eyes continued across the room to a pair of gouges in the wall where the two bottles had struck with some force, hurled by an unknown hand.

"By the Norns," Thor muttered. "What happened? Why does the beer smell spoiled like that?" He looked to Steve, but Steve did not turn away. The room felt electrified, and he could feel the buzz of it in his bones.

"Can you give me a ride into town?" he asked.

  
  
  


Thor dropped him off in front of the library. The twenty minute trip had been torture for his bad knee and Thor was clearly reluctant to leave him, but Steve insisted he would be fine. Thor left him a number to call in case he needed a ride back and left for the brewery, though Steve wasn't sure if he had work to do or if he just wanted to retreat. Steve himself had to admit he didn't want to be in the house the way it felt right now, even if it meant being around normal people, but libraries were usually quiet and ghost free. He limped inside, glad of his cane, and with a quick stop at the front desk obtained a visitor's card for the library system. The building itself was an old Victorian mansion with an unlovely addition jammed onto the back. Steve claimed a table in the sunny reading room overlooking a blowsy rear lawn. The furniture had been put away and the grass grew shaggy, covered with fallen leaves. The soft scent of sun-warmed paper, lemon wood polish, and a ticklish hint of dust soothed him and the events at the house seemed very far away.

He turned toward the nonfiction section and came face to face for the first time with Obadiah Stane. A large portrait of him hung over the reference desk, overseeing the library with sharp, commanding eyes. The portrait artist had not tried to make the big man with his bald head and salt and pepper beard handsome, but he gave off an intense charisma. If not for the modern cut of his suit, Steve might have easily believed he was a 19th century robber baron still watching over his former domain with false benevolence. He found he echoed Rhodes' hope that he would never meet his benefactor face to face, and moved his notebook to a cubicle far from his painted gaze even though it meant giving up the warm beam of sunlight.

A kinder, but still familiar image watched over the computer terminals. The smiling features of Maria Stark watched over the wing donated in her memory. Steve stopped to critique her portrait as well, much smaller and more intimate than Stane's but clearly the work of the same artist. She looked like a Classical sculpture and wore an elegant but undefined garment that might have been a gown or a drape. The artist hadn't known her in life, he decided, but had been familiar with Stane.

He sat at one of the computers and his knee grew marginally less painful. Keeping it bent on Thor's bike had been agony, but even worse was the helpless feeling of someone else driving him. He'd had to close his eyes and fight the urge to try to control the bike; he knew that could cause a wreck and he didn't want Thor's blood on his hands. He logged into his email and rubbed his knee under the desk.

He had several messages from Sam that grew increasingly insistent as he worked through them. The most recent one had a blank body and said "write me back, dickhead" in the subject line. Steve smiled to himself and settled in to write a response, mindful of the forty-five minutes of time he had left on the computer. He'd never been much good at typing and it took him awhile to do it justice. He described his time at the house for awhile, but he left out anything that would lead him to worry. Sam knew a little about his "gift" but Steve didn't know how much he believed; he didn't want him to think he'd gone crazy. Finally he dropped a single hint that the house wasn't as isolated as Sam might think, and left it at that. Only after he'd hit send did it occur to him that Sam might think he'd met someone, either a friend or lover, but it was too late. He'd sworn he wouldn't date until his head was right, and his head just kept getting worse. Sam still pushed him from time to time to at least make some friends, but the dead who followed him around were more company than he needed already.

He shut his email in irritation and went to a search engine instead, typing in the first thing that came to mind: Obadiah Stane. He'd made news in the last decade, infrequently but always in a big way. Business journals had done a number of stories on him after he became the sole head of Stark Industries, mostly praising him for expanding their focus into consumer products like cell phones and biomedical tech as the late Anthony Stark had wanted, but a few talked about the highly focused, and highly profitable, military division. Stane had reorganized it, given it the innocuous name StarkTech, and kept it running far from the public eye, the article said. While hampered by the loss of Stark's genius, Stane continued to recruit the best and brightest talent to produce new weapons for the US military. Steve felt the tension in his jaw increase as he read about the improved drone capabilities and even deadlier guided missiles they had made. 

Stane's photos haunted him. No matter his age, the man was imposing and seemed as unchanging as a mountain peak. Most of the shots were from photo shoots or public events and Steve noticed that the same man appeared in the background multiple times, a pale, slim man in a plain suit who was never credited. Stane himself seemed to draw the eye, even if he was not the central subject of the photo, and Steve found himself studying a portrait shot of the man. He couldn't place what he recognized about him, what had been nagging at him the whole time he read. The oldest link he clicked took him to a short blurb, dated to just after Tony's death. It was little more than a rumor, it seemed, with only a single unnamed source, but it alleged that Stark Industries had been working for several years to develop a hand-held immobilzer, something like a taser that caused paralysis, but had scrapped the project due to "practical and ethical concerns" on Stane's part. The author implied the weapon had been the last pet project of Tony Stark and that everyone at the company was vaguely embarrassed about it and was happy it could be decently abandoned and buried now that he had died. 

Steve wanted to know more and went back to Google, but before he could do much more than glance at his results his time ran out, closing his windows. A pop up assured him that he'd be able to use another two hours the next day. Steve sat back, frustrated and surprised that he'd lost so much time. HE hadn’t even had a chance to look up Maggie Partridge, or find her blog about the Apparition Project. His leg had stiffened and his knee nearly buckled when he stood. He stifled a curse as he stretched it, but he was again surprised that he'd become so immersed in something that he actually forgot about it.

He signed out of the computer and wandered the stacks. Reading reminded him of being in the hospital, both as a child and more recently, and it was not something he often did for pleasure. He didn't want to go back to the house yet. It was late morning now and the library was more crowded. Some sort of story time was going on in the children's section, which he avoided, and about a dozen people were browsing. It began to bother him that the shelves formed blind alleys and that he could hear people moving around that he couldn't see. He was going to have to leave. Eyes were on him, crawling up his spine, and he spun around, but the only one watching him was the painted Obadiah Stane. Again he felt the flash of recognition and this time it came to him: despite the fine suit and the paternalistic smile, Stane had the eyes of a warlord, that same charisma that drew people in and kept them loyal with a love that was mostly fear. Steve backed away from the painting and stumbled into a display table set up with recommended books. The noise of it drew looks from the other patrons and startled him back to the present, where Stane was only a portrait and the war was half a world away, not over, but over for him.

He ducked his eyes and righted the books he had knocked over on the table, scarcely looking at them. The display was for Halloween and scattered among the Stephen King and Shirley Jackson were several books on local ghost lore and true crime. The last one was called American Royalty, an "unauthorized biography" of the life and death of Anthony Edward Stark. Steve propped it up on the table but it fell open, showing a black and white photo of the lake house on one side and Stark's Pond on the other. It felt like a mistake, but he picked it up. He avoided the librarian with her curious eyes and used the self-checkout, then fled with the book down the front steps.

The trees along the street were a riot of color but many were nearly bare after all the rain. Steve watched the sidewalk as he limped along, wary of the damp and slippery piles that spilled out of gutters and lurked along the street. He tucked his book under his arm but it still made him nervous that neither of his hands were free. He didn't know where he would go. He hadn't thought about how he would get back from town; he had a number for Thor but no phone, a few dollars in his jacket, and a shiny new library card, but not much else. His knee hurt but he tuned it out and enjoyed the day, the brisk wind blowing chilly but the sun bright. He did not rush.

A few blocks up he passed a small cafe and next to it, in front of a hardware store, a familiar figure was stepping off a familiar bike. Thor stowed his helmet and Steve froze, not sure if he wanted to see him at the moment, but it was too late. Thor waved to him and Steve waited for him to come over, tucking the book into his jacket so it wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t ashamed of it, exactly, but Thor didn’t need to see it..

“Can I buy you lunch?” Steve offered. “Return the hospitality?” Thor smiled, and Steve expected he would say yes, but he looked into the cafe and thought better of it.

“Maybe another time,” Thor said. He gave Steve a sheepish look, and Steve noticed he was getting more than a few unfriendly glares through the window already. “I’m not exactly welcome in there. Or most places in town. Besides,” he said, filling his voice with false cheer, “I should be getting back to the brewery. I have vats to clean. Would you like a ride back?”

“That would be great,” Steve said, even though it was going to be extremely painful. He had never felt the need for a car when he lived in New York, but out here it left him stranded and at the mercy of others. At least on the motorcycle there was no need to make conversation.

  
  
  


Thor dropped him off at the house and Steve again turned down his offer to help clean up. He watched Thor's bike disappear up the driveway and listened as the sound of the engine grew fainter and faded away. He sat on the porch, already in shadow in the slanting afternoon sun, until the cold started to seep into his knee.

"Hell with this," he said to himself. He dusted off his jeans and entered the house, braced for the smell of beer and the tense menace of the morning only to find the house neutral, cold and dim and empty. In the kitchen the bright trail of shattered glass and sticky beer was gone, as though it had never been, but the growlers were nowhere to be seen. A single glass sat on the kitchen table, a low, expensive looking scotch tumbler. Steve had never seen it in the house before, and despite being an innocuous looking object it filled him with dread. He thought he should turn and walk away, but he picked it up. The glass was dry and devoid of lip marks or fingerprints, but it was so cold it hurt to touch it. He caught a whiff of something familiar, the heather and honey smokiness of excellent scotch, and he was lost in another time and place.

  
  


From the quiet of the house he plunged into a feverish party. Light and color whirled around him in a dizzy, disjointed rush and vertigo nearly toppled him. Burning cold scotch sloshed over fingers that were not his but he didn't fall. A hand as hard as iron clamped onto his arm and held him upright and the force of it ached through Stee's own arm like a bruise.

"Having fun?" a voice said, low in his ear.

"Sure, Obie," he felt himself say, but it was a lie. His veins were full of ice and he was still dizzy, but everyone was watching him. He met Stane's piercing gaze for a moment and flushed with borrowed shame.

"Good," Stane said. "You should enjoy yourself. The launch is a success and this party is for you."

He ducked his eyes and found himself looking into a mirror, at a face that was not his own but was, dark sad eyes in a smiling face, the dishevelled remains of an immaculate tuxedo unbuttoned at his neck. The mirror was a glass table, he realized, the surface dusted with white powder. A young woman with honey colored hair let out of its restraining pins was cutting a fresh line and grinning suggestively at him. Her black dress was torn at the neck and one pale breast spilled out. She licked her lips and sat back with her legs open beneath her skirt, wordlessly inviting him to partake. The woman and the drugs, the glass in his hand, the thing he had brought into the world that was being celebrated, all of it filled him with a weary, cold, and sick self-loathing and he wanted none of it. He looked around for someone to take him home, images Steve recognized as Thor or Rhodey, but he was alone, and this was on him.

"I'm heading out, Tony, before things get too lively. But you stay a while." Obadiah winked at him. "Go on, have fun." The iron grip steered him toward the table and the dizzy whirl of light and distorted laughter.

"I want...home..." he tried, but he couldn't get the words out. They slurred together and choked off as Obadiah's face lost its jocular air.

"I'll send a car around before morning, don't worry," he said, though that had not been what Tony was concerned about and they both knew it. Stane guided him into the vise-like embrace of the woman, the drugs, the expectations, and left him to it.

"Enjoy the party," Stane said, all indulgence, and left him there. He faked a laugh and gulped his drink, hoping it would numb the guilt and shame this time even if it never had before. He sat next to the woman and she guided him toward the dusty table. Her hand was down the front of his pants before Stane had reached the front door, and he did not look back. Steve saw himself, but not himself, reflected in the glass one last time, eyes dark as the lake and full of loss.

The dark pool of the stranger's eyes expanded and the vision retreated. Steve found he was sitting at the end of the pier, looking into the black water below. The sun was going down and a cold wind rustled the leaves and rippled the water, but it still seemed to be happening in another world, apart from him. He was freezing, a chill in his bones running up from his right hand to fill his whole body with cold. His fingers were clenched around an invisible glass and he felt drunk himself, nauseated and dizzy as if he'd drunk down the man's shame, his guilt, his deep self-loathing, until the bottle of bitterness ran dry. He thought he might vomit or black out but the storm of emotions whirled within him without even that relief. Why would Tony Stark, a ghost he'd never even seen, want to show him the night he died? Was it the night he died? Steve had felt a sense of doom in the vision, but he couldn't say if Tony had survived that night or not.


	4. Chapter 4

Steve returned to himself sitting on the dock, his feet swinging over the dark water. The sun had sunk behind the trees and only a faint slash of fading light still lit the world. He was freezing with a cold that he could not attribute to just the chill afternoon breeze, an icy cold that ran in his bones. His right hand was clenched white around the glass and the cold leached into his veins from it, though when he looked down it was empty. His reflection in the water wavered darkly for a moment before the stranger's face resolved into his own, but it still felt wrong after the intensity of the dream. Had he seen the night of Tony Stark's death? His senses were his own again but the despair remained, that hopeless self-loathing guilt that twisted his guts. Tears burned in his eyes and he felt as though he was falling into a well, the same well he'd lived in while he was in the hospital. The emotions had been the dead man's, he knew, but they wound through him and wove their way into him like ivy into mortar. 

What use was he to anyone now? He couldn't even paint. He had lost everyone, let them down, seen his best friend and the men who trusted him blown apart, their blood soaking into the dry red earth of a foreign land. He had taken this position from someone who deserved it. He had killed in a war where the enemy could wear the face of an innocent, a child strapped to a bomb that could level a building. As the sun sank into the lake and darkness and cold spread over the house, he wondered how it would feel to lower himself into the water. He could swim out into the center of Stark's pond until he was too cold and too weak to swim back and let those black waters take him, as they had taken Tony before him, and it would all be over. He wondered how it would feel, if it would be different from that day in the desert.

"It's cold," said a voice behind him, as if answering his question. "And it burns your eyes."

Steve turned slowly, finding it hard to be afraid of anything when he was contemplating the easy death before him. Tony stark sat next to him on the dock with his hands lose and resting on his knees. He looked very little like the man in the photos, though it was unmistakably him. His eyes stood out dark and alive against his pale face and his black hair dripped phantom water into his face. He wore only a sodden, dripping bathrobe of some thin but expensive looking material that clung to his grey-white chest and shoulders, providing little protection against the cold autumn night. He could see the wood of the dock through Tony's thighs and his feet were nearly transparent, as though most of the spirit's energy went to rendering his face and hands in vivid, life-like detail. Steve had seen few ghosts as aware and solid as this one.

"Are you Anthony Stark?" he asked.

"Please, call me Tony," the ghost said.

"What are you doing here?" Steve had encountered only a small fraction of the dead who could communicate at all, much less have a conversation, and they had always had urgent business.

"I live here," Tony said. He seemed taken aback by the question. "At least some of the time. When I need to work. Or…think."

"What do you need? What are you waiting for?" Steve didn't want to tell him he was dead, but he would; it wasn't good to mislead spirits.

"I'd like your name, for a start," Tony said. He leaned toward Steve and smiled a most charming smile, spoiled slightly by the way the dregs of light shone through him.

"I'm Steve Rogers," he said. "Formerly Captain Rogers."

"Good to meet you," Tony said. He nodded in acknowledgement. "I've seen you around, but I didn't think you'd want to talk to me."

"Why not?" Steve asked, curious in spite of himself. Why would a debonair, confident billionaire not think he could talk to him?

"You're out of my league," Tony said, flashing that self-deprecating smile of his. "It would be a shame if this water got into those gorgeous eyes of yours."

"What?" Steve was thoroughly confused. He had never run into an earthbound spirit that wanted to flirt before, though he had been propositioned by a dead prostitute in Manhattan. She hadn't been a personal thing, though, more of an echo.

"I'm not too popular with the military right now," Tony said. "Not since the word got around, anyway."

"I don't know anything about that," Steve said, truthfully, and Tony perked up a little.

"I'm not sure how you missed it or if you're just being polite, but thank you anyway," Tony said. "Aren't you cold?"

Steve was, in fact, freezing. He flexed the cramp out of his hand, a reminder of what had led him out here, but a mundane chill had permeated his whole body, and Tony, soaking wet and barely dressed, had to be even worse. Except, of course, that he was already dead, and Steve needed to remember that. He still felt the black, bilious depression sitting in his chest like a cancer, but his mind had cleared.

He struggled to regain his feet. His knee didn't hurt but it wouldn't take his weight, either, and he staggered back to the end of the dock and up to the porch. It was full dark now, with only the faintest sliver of pink in the sky. When he turned back, he was alone. A trail of wet footprints shone on the weathered wood but stopped far from the end. Steve sighed and went into the house. Inside was warm but only by comparison, and Steve paced back and forth down the length of the hallway until his blood felt less like ice and his knee began to ache with returned circulation.

He did not retreat to his bedroom this night as he had before when strange things had happened in the house. It wouldn't matter, he told himself, though the bedroom had been neutral so far, and he didn't feel like trying the stairs at the moment. Tony was clearly at home in the house where he'd died, and really Steve should be glad that his spirit wasn't angry. He curled up on the chaise in the workroom instead, glad to find that Thor's blanket from the night before hadn't disappeared. He tucked it around himself and huddled in the pool of amber lamplight like an island in the quiet, moonless night. He refused to think about the lake lurking behind him. 

He'd seen corpses before and the thought of one in the water didn't bother him. Tony intrigued him, though. Suicides held on. He saw them often enough in the city that he'd learned not to react unless other people did if someone leapt from a building or jumped onto the train tracks. The jostling, noisy crowds on the subway were a problem for him, but the real reason for the L Train Incident, as he thought of it, and as his therapists had referred to it, had been seeing a pregnant girl, no more than fifteen if he'd had to guess, in ratty clothes. He'd tried not to go during a rush hour, but the trains were crowded at all times and yet the passengers flowed around the girl like her abject misery was contagious. He'd been struggling himself, trying to fight the rising panic he felt in the enclosed space with people on all sides, brushing past him from behind, bumping and flowing around, but he'd tried to reach out to her in her little island on the platform where she stood hunched inside a filthy coat, blue-tinged fingers poking from her fraying thin gloves and a ragged hat covering her long greasy hair. He might have realized then, because it was a sweltering July day, that she was dead, but he didn't realize immediately even when she turned and looked at him, really saw him, and her eyes were solid black. No words passed between them, but he felt he despair and her anger spark between them like a bolt of lightning. They had little in common on the surface but he knew the darkness that wept from her eyes like tears, had felt it himself in the long painful nights he spent in the hospital. Their connection lasted only a heartbeat, maybe less, and the girl turned away. 

The familiar rumble of an approaching train rattled the platform and the girl moved through the crowd like the ghost she was with long purposeful strides. Those she passed by, or through, shivered at an unexpected blast of cold air or an intrusive feeling of sadness, frustration, guilt, despair, and she reached the edge. Steve, too slow with his stiff leg and his cane and his broken mind, tried to step after her, but she looked down the tunnel at the approaching light and stepped off onto the rails. He'd shouted, pushed through to the edge, unable to put it into words but wanting to help her even as the train came in. People muttered as he teetered over the edge, though a few seemed to realize something was wrong. A man grabbed his shoulder and Steve whirled around with his fist clenched, stopping himself from hurting him because he realized the stranger thought he meant to jump. The man stepped back with his hands up and Steve backed down, shook his head and muttered something between thanks and apology, because he saw there was no body on the tracks. Not today. What he had seen had played out an unknown amount of time ago and that girl was bound here by the violence that had ended her life. He looked at the crowds on the platform around him and instead of wondering if one of them had a bomb he wondered if any of them were like her. He didn't go into the subways after that.

Now, sitting wrapped in a blanket that a ghost had brought him, he wondered if he could have helped the girl in the train station, and maybe still could. If a dead man could hear his thoughts and come to him, speak to him, who knew what else could happen. His mother had believed him when he came home from the hospital as a boy and complained of the presences that crowded close. She'd told him that they couldn't hurt him, or wouldn't, and that he could ignore them if he wanted. But she'd also said it could be a special calling for him, to help them cross over, to let go of the pain or complete the task that kept them here where they didn't belong. What did Tony Stark need? A billionaire in life, a genius, blessed with at least two staunch friends that he knew of, what had lead to him stepping off that dock and sinking down into that icy water?

He got the book from the library and made himself some coffee and a hasty sandwich. There was no sign of anything out of place in the kitchen; the glass that had sent him outside and the mess from that morning were both missing and the house felt calm, not live wire tense as it had before. He went back to the paint spattered chaise and tucked the blanket around himself, surprised to be comforted by the scent of it, some sort of warm, spicy scent like cedar, faint but present. It was probably Thor's aftershave, but it was nice to have something that reminded him that there were other people alive in the world.

The biography began tamely enough, describing briefly the people who would go on to be Tony's parents. Howard Stark the genius, his meteoric rise as an arms inventor. He was only a few pages in and the author had lost significant credibility for trying to refer to him as the Merchant of Death without a hint of self awareness. She was more sympathetic to Tony's mother Maria, but the woman came across as a cypher. Howard Stark was reduced to an allegory, but his wife remained a mystery beyond a few basic facts, born, married, died. An intensely private person, he would guess, not unlike his own mother for all the difference in their situations. She gave generously but remained anonymous and her most intimate friends had remained closed-lipped about her after her death. 

The reporter rushed through their marriage and the years they spent without children. Of Tony's early life, she included his drawings and equations he'd made before he could even talk. A smarmy staged photo of him as a toddler in his father's workshop got a full page and Steve recognized Stane standing with them. Howard's face had all the paternal warmth of an engine block. He looked like he was showing off a trained dog or a machine, something he'd designed and whose continued function he was entitled to dictate. Stane stood with his hand on Tony's shoulder, steadying him as he examined a massive and complex something or other and he saw how Tony, through all the years and the grainy photograph, had leaned into that touch. There was still something he didn't like about Stane, he decided, in the picture, some hungry, possessive quality that said there was more than avuncular affection for his business partner's son. He saw with a shock that the same tall, angular man, with his unmistakable white blonde hair, stood a few feet behind Stane. He knew he'd seen the man in his vision and he'd looked just the same, despite the fifteen years difference in his age. Steve checked but the book hadn't bothered to identify him, only the three principal subjects. He grumbled in frustration, but he wouldn't have let that man anywhere near a child. If Stane reminded him of a warlord, the pale man was an enforcer, the kind of man who would cut off a finger or mutilate a face with the same detached casualness he showed doing anything else.

He turned the page, glad to be away from the unsettling photograph. It seemed innocuous enough, but it left a chill tingling in his fingertips, faint but there. The author kept going, painting Tony as a spoiled, stubborn boy whose brilliance could never make up for his other faults. She detailed every rumor and unsourced anecdote she could find about his supposed bad behavior, though even she couldn't find much worse than driving his father's Lamborghini without permission and speeding. He hadn't even crashed it, and Steve was glad no one had a reason to go over his youth with such a fine comb. He'd been in so many fights and had a file so thick at school that the letter R files took a whole drawer to themselves. His mother told him he was lucky she'd kissed the Blarney stone as a girl or she wouldn't have been able to keep him from getting expelled. He maintained that he'd never started it, not with someone who didn't deserve it. 

Whatever Tony Stark had done to this author to make her hate him, Steve wasn't convinced he was really a bad apple, and he noticed she skimmed over the amazing robots he built when he was still a preteen but lavished three paragraphs on the time he was sent home early from a program abroad for "conduct unbecoming a young gentleman" and another page and a half speculating what that might have entailed. Any residual belief that this was going to be a fair look at the man vanished when she built to her final, explosive, controversial verdict: Tony had been bisexual. She presented "evidence", again unsourced, off the record hearsay, that he'd been caught in flagrante with another male student. Steve snorted aloud. That's your evidence that he's some sort of deviant, he thought. Had she ever seen Thor? In fact, she hinted that the other student had not been named deliberately- had he been making out with a handsome royal?

He didn't have any good opinion to lose when he got to the death of Tony's parents, and he wasn't surprised that the author relished every grisly detail, or that she had somehow gotten ahold of photos that looked like they'd been taken at the scene. He was surprised, however that she dismissed the notion of murder. A wealthy young couple, beautiful, super rich American royalty themselves, living their charmed lives, had burned alive when their Bentley exploded in their driveway. Their driver, somehow thrown clear of the blast, had crawled inside with his burned flesh trailing behind him in ribbons and called for help, but he had died soon after he got out of the hospital. The author repeated a rumor that he'd left a note saying he still saw the Starks coming down the front steps, heard them screaming, felt them burning in his missing hand, before he locked himself in the garage with the engine running. He'd lost his mind from the pain, maybe, or perhaps he had something to feel guilty about. She cut the rest of the chapter short, he noticed, and concluded that the deaths had been a random act of terrorism, claimed by several groups but never linked by evidence. The police, FBI, ATF, and Interpol had never been able to trace the car bomb's signature to a specific maker, but it had been linked to a handful of other unsolved homicides around the globe. Howard Stark, she concluded, had had plenty of enemies, and one of them had taken the opportunity to do him in.

He wondered what Tony must have felt. The book was strangely quiet on the topic, on Tony's reaction in general, and he wondered why she hadn't taken the chance to even hint that he'd had some involvement in the murder that made him a billionaire before he could legally drink. Stane had come out smelling like roses, of course, though he took over controlling interest in Stark Industries with his partner's death. Maybe that was why she didn't try to say anything about Tony, Steve thought darkly. Once you open the closets, all the skeletons come out. He wasn't sure why he felt such a strong urge to protect Tony Stark. It wouldn't make him any less dead. But this woman was out to smear him, he thought, and it rubbed him wrong. He couldn't go to Bucky's funeral, and he wasn't sure he would have even if he hadn't been in a hospital on the other side of the world. How could he explain Bucky being dead? Bucky was life. He was big, and warm, and loud. He was there. Nothing could replace him, and it could never be right for him not to be there. How must Tony have felt, both his parents torn from him in a moment of blood and flame.

He skimmed the rest of the following chapters as Tony invented weapons and deflowered heiresses with minimal interest, as he no longer trusted the author not to outright lie if she thought she could get away with it. She still reported every rumored liason with a male as though she'd uncovered Watergate even though Tony apparently made minimal effort to hide his romantic partners. His drug use and his drinking were more problematic but in every photo he saw of Tony Stark the party animal he saw again the boy Thor had known, unable to connect in a place where he didn't fit and desperate for affection and people worthy of trust. They were using you, he thought. Stane kept you distracted and in his debt so he could harness your genius without risking you becoming an opponent. Did something happen to change that? Did you see through the charade? Why would a man who had everything to gain by keeping you around let you die?

He kept reading, dreading the end of the book. He knew, of course, how it would end, but he felt a rise of anxiety crawling up his back as the number of pages dwindled. He stared with shock at a photo of Stark's Pond taken from a familiar angle, almost where he was sitting if he turned around. An awful, vague white outline of a familiar corpse floated face down in the water, satin robe billowing around it.

"What happened to me?" the ghost asked, and Steve jerked his head up. Tony stood in front of him, more solid than he'd been outside. Wet footprints trailed across the floor and water dripped from his drenched clothes and hair. He looked down at himself and back up at Steve with his dark eyes burning, his skin so pale it glowed in the dark room beyond the circle of light. He took a step closer to Steve and the lamp flickered. The chill of the lake washed over Steve, cutting through the warm blanket like a knife. The book slid from Steve's chilled fingers and landed with a soft sound on the bed.

"You died," he said, as gently as he could. Tony held up his hands and examined them in disbelief. "Do you remember?"

"No! I…That can't be right. I feel…"

"Alive?"

"Yes!"

"Are you sure?"

"I saw you. Down at the pier. You were looking into the water. You were thinking…."

"I was thinking," Steve admitted, and neither of them voiced what he had been thinking. "Did that draw you to me?"

"You seemed lonely," Tony said. But not as lonely as you, Steve thought. None of them had ever spoken more than a few words to him. The dead were an odd mix of cryptic and to the point. Tony was stronger than any spirit he'd ever met, but he didn't seem to know what he wanted, or needed, to move on. "I thought I could talk to you," Tony continued. The lamp flickered and dimmed noticeably but Tony himself seemed to stabilize and look more natural, like a man standing in a dim room and not a vengeful spectre.

"Is that what you want?" Steve asked. "Do you need to talk?"

"I was drunk," Tony said. "That's what I remember. I got drunk and I fell in the water. I said I wouldn't do that anymore. I promised them I wouldn't," Tony pleaded. "Did you pull me out?" He came another step closer to Steve, close enough that his spectral water fell on Steve's living knees and left numb spots on his skin where they landed.

"I tried to," Steve said. I was about a decade too late, but I tried to.

"Rhodey will be so angry," Tony said. He seemed to shrink into himself and fade, and the lamp got brighter. "And Thor. They deserve better."

"They forgive you," Steve said. It was probably true, after all. "What do you want, Tony?"

"Can I stay here with you?" He turned his dark eyes to Steve, and the most frightening thing was how alive they looked. He should say no. He should send him to the light, or whatever ghost whisperers did.

"You can stay," came out of his mouth instead. The ghost smiled at him, the beautiful, genuine smile of the living man in Thor's old photograph, and he faded away, first to mist, then a shadow, then to nothing. The temperature in the room returned to the normal chill of a drafty house on a cold night and the metallic smell of the lake dissipated and became a faint whiff of an expensive cologne, warm and spicy like cedar.

"What the fuck," he asked himself. He scrubbed his face with his numb fingers and flexed his bad knee. He'd given the spirit permission. Who knew what he'd do now? He picked the book up and flipped it open again, but his focus was broken. Seeing the ghost, interacting with him, had made the book seem even more luridly distasteful. The pages inevitably fell open to the same place he'd been when Tony appeared, the picture of the lake with the body in it. Except the photo was only of Stark's Pond. It had been taken after the body was removed, and there was no trace of Tony in the black water of the picture, no matter how he scrutinized it.

"Fine," he said. He snapped the book down on the side table and struggled to his feet. His leg protested but he got untangled from the blanket and stalked to the door.

"This can be your room," he told the ghost. "I'm going up to bed. Turn off the light when you're done."

He started his nightly struggle up the stairs, gripping the bannister and doubting his bad leg at every twinge. When he was halfway up the staircase, he heard the click of the light in the room below and the light went out, plunging the house into darkness.

He lay in bed in the dark as his pulse throbbed through his knee like knives. He was hyper aware of the house, alert for any hint of footsteps or other weirdness, but nothing came. Tony must have gone to bed too, he thought, as though the ghost were an inconsiderate roommate and not the tormented spirit of a suicide. Tony hadn't crossed over when Steve told him he could stay. He'd settled deeper into the house, and it felt less tense than it had for some time, less like it was pulling him toward something, but he didn't trust it. He fell asleep and dreamed of the lake again, but this time he stood at the water's edge unable to move. He was paralyzed, tremors running though his body, barely able to breathe, hands pushed him from the dock and sent him into the black water. It closed over him and he had to keep his eyes open as Bucky leaned over the pier, no expression on his face as he watched Steve go down, just a professional, thorough detachment to make sure the job got done. A rushing noise filled his ears as he sank and drowned, a sense in his heart that this was the worst thing he would ever see, the worst thing he would ever know, whatever it was.

Steve gasped awake and half flung himself off the bed, but the assault on his senses didn't end with the dream. The whole house was shaking and a gale of wind was shrieking in off the lake, buffeting the house with hurricane force. He'd never heard a noise like it before, not even on the battlefield; it vibrated in the bones. Not even his military training could stand up to a sound like that. He curled under his blankets and hid, covering his ears with his arms and squeezing his eyes shut.

The wind died in an instant, but his own breathing and the hammer of his heart took much longer to quiet down. He looked at the clock and found it was just after 1am; he'd been asleep for five hours already, longer than he could usually get in a night. He limped from the bed, still fighting his panic. He thought about getting his gun from under the bed, but he couldn't shoot the wind. Or a ghost. About all he was good for at this point would be shooting himself, he admitted, and he crept toward the bedroom door.

He stepped out and looked down the stairs. The house was quiet, and he saw nothing out of place. No sign of the violent cacophony that had shaken the bones of the house only moments ago, but he couldn't start down the steps. The base of the stairs was lost in a darkness so total he didn't believe it was natural, a darkness that resisted any moonbeam or effort of Steve's night vision to pierce it. The darkness boiled with a cold rage and even at the top of the stairs he could feel it clammy and wet against his skin. If he went down there, it would choke the life out of his lungs and replace his warm blood with the blood scented water of the lake. In some ways he was more scared than he'd ever been in his life but it called to him all the same, offering an end to his pain and loneliness. An invitation. But that cloud was not for anything living, and no matter how he'd been thinking since Afghanistan Steve wanted to go on living. 

He backed into the bedroom and shut the door. He leaned against it and felt a cold draft against his ankles from under the door and the knob clammy in his palm, but he was safe. The anger wasn't for him and it would leave him alive if he stayed in here. He limped back to bed and laid down, pulling all the blankets over himself in a heap. He shivered beneath them and it got worse and worse, so hard he bit his tongue and tasted blood. His eyes burned and tears ran down his cheeks until the whole thing rose to a crescendo and he began to weep, sobbing helplessly. At first he choked it back, but soon he couldn't keep it in any longer and he began to sob in earnest. He'd never cried, not for Bucky, not for the others, not for himself and his pain and his crippled, broken, uselessness, not for his empty life that might as well be over, and all of it spilled out now, wracked him with months of pent up fury, grief, and loss. He cried until his guts hurt, his pillow and the front of his shirt were both soaked, and the blankets were torn loose from the bed. His eyes were so red, puffed and burning that he couldn't see, not that there was much to see in the middle of the night, He had spent himself, and he felt husked and empty, aching and alone. Tears welled again in his eyes and he let them come, more gently this time, and in the blurry darkness of the room he saw a figure standing over him, the familiar one-armed outline that had haunted him before, and a wave of warmth washed over him. Bucky was standing watch for him, and he could rest. Steve slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep like he had not done in years.

He woke up and wondered if the whole thing had been a dream, at first. He no longer felt Bucky standing over him and the bright mid morning sunlight made the whole incident seem incredibly unlikely, from the phantom wind to the damp cloud of anger. He sat up and his abs twinged and ached, sore with exertion, and his eyes were crusted with gunk. He touched his face and found a tight crust of salt on his cheeks and knew that the crying, at least, had been real, but he felt good. At least in relative terms, of course, because he was sore and messy and still had a bad knee and no idea what to do with his life, but better than he had been in some time. He got up and found a clean set of sheets in the linen closet. He stripped and remade the bed, the familiar task soothing and satisfying. Even his knee was having a good day, loose and overly bendy but not tight or painful or threatening to drop him on the ground with every step. He stripped down and took a long shower, letting the warm water wash away the damage of the night before. He took his time drying off and changing into fresh clothes, a blue sweater that he hadn't worn since before he'd gone to war. Bucky had liked it on him, in that joking way of his, said it did his biceps and his eyes both good. The memory made his eyes sting, but for once he let himself feel it and didn't shut it down. The fabric was a little musty from storage, but it pressed soft against his skin and he took a moment to enjoy the sensation and remember his friend without the surge of guilt and anger.

Finally he really had nothing left to do upstairs. He felt hollow inside and he recognized that he was starving. He hadn't eaten since lunch the day before and it was after noon now. He stood at the top of the staircase and drew a deep breath. There was nothing to be scared of, he told himself, Looking down, he saw only sunlight on the wood floors, no sound beyond the faint lapping of the lake and the rustle of leaves. Steve went down and avoided the workroom, heading for the kitchen. He grabbed everything that looked good in the kitchen and took three plates of food out on the back porch. The cold breeze was refreshing but he was warm enough in the sun. He'd always liked days like this and he knew the last warmth was dwindling down towards November when it would no longer be comfortable to come out here to eat. Halfway through a roast beef sandwich it occurred to him that there was no sign out here of the wind he'd felt the night before. No downed trees or limbs, leaves still on the branches, no damage to the pier or the exterior of the house. Even the patio furniture was where he'd left it. It didn't surprise him, but he didn't think he'd imagined it, either. It had all been too real, even if it now felt like a dream.

He wanted to draw, he decided, and that meant the workroom. This is my house, he thought. I can't get rid of Tony but he has to share while I'm here. The workroom was markedly colder than the rest of the house, colder than it had been outside. A breeze came in from the open windows and Tony sat at a desk that wasn't there anymore in front of them, hunched over something and hard at work. He didn't react to Steve at all and faded swiftly away.

At first Steve thought that it had snowed in this room somehow, as the floor was covered with drifts of white that swirled in the breeze and gathered in the corners. A larger bit blew to his feet and he picked it up. It was a ragged piece of paper, torn smaller than a fingernail, and he realized it was covered with words. He grabbed a handful and examined them together, finding fragments of familiar purple prose and anecdotal evidence. Further in he came upon bits of cardboard and binding and even the heavy laminated dust jacket, all torn to pieces and flung about the room. He stood in the center of the whirling destruction that hadn't even ruffled the pages of his sketchbook and surveyed the wreckage.

"That was a library book, Tony," he said. He turned to go scrounge up a broom and the light clicked on behind him. He turned back and noticed that there was a new book on the side table under the lamp, a beat up copy of The Return of the King that looked like it had been read to tatters.

"That's not how the library works," he said, and left the room.

He found a broom in the hall closet and dug deep for a dustpan as well. He returned to the work room and started to sweep the bits of the murdered book into piles but he had to get down on the floor to get under the furniture. He sighed dramatically for his invisible audience and worked himself into a crouch, sticking his bad leg out behind him so he could put all his weight on his good knee. Once he was down he looked beneath the desk and realized the paper went all the way to wall.

"Dammit, Tony," he muttered. He slithered on his belly as far under the desk as he could get and strained against the bottom edge, blindly brushing with his hand to dislodge the paper. HE pressed his face against the scarred wooden side but the desk was so heavy it didn't budge. Something rapped against the wood, inches from his face, a sharp knock that sent vibrations through his cheek and shoulder. It came from inside the desk. Steve pushed back quickly and sent himself sprawling, knocking piles of paper askew in his haste.

"Tony?" he said aloud.

"Were you expecting someone?" he heard behind him. Colonel Rhodes was standing in the door to the workroom and the front door was still open behind him.

"No…I mean, was that you knocking just now?"

"I knocked a few times. We have an appointment today. Did you forget?" Rhodes didn't seem all that angry, and Steve realized he had no idea what day it was. He hadn't looked at a calendar in ages.

"I must have," he said. "I'm sorry, I've been preoccupied lately."

"Artists," Rhodes said, with an eye roll that seemed almost fond. "Don't worry, I'm used to it. Do you need a hand?" he stepped closer and reached down to help Steve up. "It looks like a snow globe in here."

"Yeah, there was an accident. I think." Rhodes turned sharp eyes on Steve and then swept the room again.

"You checked out that damned book, didn't you?" Rhodes asked, and Steve was so shocked he only nodded. What else could he say?

"This is the worst I've ever seen it. Come outside and we'll talk. I can't stand being in here right now."

Rhodes left the room and Steve lingered a few moments to brush the paper off his pants.

"Rhodey? Honey Bear?" a familiar disembodied voice whispered behind him, but Steve was in no mood to deal with the ghost right now. Steve followed him out to the back porch where Rhodes took a seat facing away from both the house and the water.

"I was going to ask how the art is going, but I think I can guess," Rhodes said. "Did Thor come out here to visit you?"

"He did," Steve said. He felt like he was ratting Thor out, somehow, but he was still distracted by the voice he'd heard leaving the room.

"He does that every time," Rhodes said with a sigh. "He's allowed up here. But he comes to visit and even if the person has never heard of Tony or the Starks and has no idea what happened in this house, suddenly they want to be a private investigator and the first thing they all do is go to the library and check out that damn book, and something always happens to it. I wish they would stop replacing it, honestly, but I don't have an in with the library board and someone clearly does. They've probably bought six copies since we started and that awful woman gets the royalty checks. She can probably feel a twitch in her webbing like a spider with a fly every time it happens."

"It's happened before?" Steve asked.

"Yes, it's happened before."

"Do you believe in ghosts?" Rhodes sighed again and sat back, giving him a disappointed look.

"No. No I do not believe in ghosts. My friend is dead. Somebody murdered him. I know who it was but I can't prove it and everyone else seems to be actively working to make sure I never can. I just don't like this house and I think it makes people…"

"Hallucinate? Hysterical?"

"Something like that. I don't know what it is. Maybe this place isn't good for some people. It is pretty far off the ass end of anywhere, out here. The only dangerous thing in these woods is living up the road in a swanky mansion. Now, do you have any work to show me yet?"

"Nothing that's ready to view," Steve said. He thought of the pages and pages of sketches, the paintings that kept turning into a lake with a body in it. He couldn't show him those. "I should apologize. For the class before. I don't know what happened out there, one minute I was doing Brooklyn and then...there was the lake."

"It's fine," Rhodey said. He sighed. "I can't be but so angry with you. It reminded me of the artist before. Detective Madigan told me what happened. They love to talk, that group, and they insist this house is haunted or something. You should hear them talk about it now, they’re practically hysterical and at the same time they’ve never been so happy. Brenda worked herself up to a full-on possession or something, instead of just thinking that all of you started painting the thing you’d all been talking about.”

“Well, I’m still sorry,” Steve said. Rhodes didn’t believe a bit of it, and Steve couldn’t argue that without sounding crazy, so they were at an impasse.

“Don’t worry about it. Just touched a sore spot. I should let you get back to work. I do hope you will have something suitable for viewing at out next check in?” He raised an eyebrow at Steve that said he was only half joking.

“Yes,” Steve promised. I will lock Tony in a closet if I have to, he thought. Rhodes turned to go, and Steve decided to press his luck.

“So who do you think killed him?” Steve asked. Rhodes paused, froze, and turned to look Steve in the eye.

“Obadiah Stane had him killed,” Rhodes said. “And then he covered it up. Someday, he’s going to pay for it. Good luck with the painting, Captain Rogers,” he said. Then he turned and got in his car without looking back.

Steve sighed and went back in the house, hoping that maybe his unseen housemate had made the paper vanish like he had the broken glass, but no such luck. The tattered remains had drifted out of the piles he had made and scattered over the floor again, as though Tony couldn't stop himself from doing violence to them. Some of them had even worked their way into the hall. Steve set to work cleaning them up again.

"Rhodey couldn't hear me," Tony said behind him. Steve turned around and Tony was in front of the window again, dripping water from his sodden robe, nearly solid except that the afternoon sun passed through him without casting a shadow.

"You're dead," Steve said, and continued sweeping.

"You said that already," Tony said. "I'm sorry about the mess. I made it, didn't I?"

"I'd say so," Steve said. "Do you remember doing it?"

"I remember I was angry," Tony said. "I hate that book. I don't want it here."

"So I gather. I agree, it's at least ninety percent fictional. It should be a made for TV movie."

"It…it is," Tony said. "I hate that too. Someone…someone watched it here, I think."

"I'm sorry," Steve said, and he was sorry for a lot of things.

"No one should have to watch Nancy Grace narrate their own death."

"I can't argue with that," Steve said. Tony sat cross legged on the chaise and watched him sweep, and for several minutes the only sounds were the scratch of the broom and the occasional drip of phantom water.

"You have to get the ones under the desk," Tony said. He was leaning forward from the waist now, and his hair was dripping more frequently. Steve wondered if his ghost got wetter when it was excited, and then mentally slapped himself for thinking it.

"I know. I got interrupted before. Don't suppose you could blow them out here or something."

"Nope. I'm going to sit here and watch."

"Asshole," Steve muttered. He told himself that he hadn't learned anything about Tony to suggest that he enjoyed watching others suffer, but you never knew with some people. He got back down despite the protests from his leg. His back was acting up on top of that, which it only did when it rained or when he'd really overdone it on his bad knee. He'd have to flail at the paper in a most undignified way, and he wasn't even sure he could get it all. He strained against the wood and tried to feel for the paper bits under the desk. Again he heard and felt the sharp knock against the inside of the desk, two this time even sharper than the first, hollow and harsh like gunshots.

Steve shot back from the desk, startled, and wrenched his knee. He lay half sprawled on the rug, gasping at the sudden pain with his heart hammering in his chest. Tony stood over him, his dark eyes clearly defined and full of concern.

"What the fuck was that for?" Steve said, his voice coming out harsh and growling.

"I just wanted to watch you crouch down, like you did before," Tony said sheepishly. "You have a nice ass," he offered as an explanation.

"So why hit it next to my ear?" Steve chose to ignore for the moment that a dead man was hitting on him.

"What?"

"Why make a loud noise right next to me if you just wanted to check out the view?" At least Tony hadn't thought it was funny to watch him struggle with his leg, not that he'd really thought that.

"I didn't," Tony said.

"What, some other ghost is haunting the inside of your desk and he waited until now to let me know?"

"Maybe," Tony said. "I didn't hear it. Are you ok?"

"No. I'm not ok. I'm fucking useless to everyone," Steve snarled. He balled his hand into a fist and slammed it down on his thigh. His vision went red and white in waves as hot and cold agony washed up and down his body from his stiff knee.

"Hey, no you aren't," Tony said. "I'm sorry. Really, I didn't realize you were hurt. Or I didn't remember. I wouldn't have…here, let me help you over to the chaise at least and you can put it up. Should I call somebody?"

"Rhodey just left and there's no one else. Also you can't work the phone," he said.

"Thor would come," Tony suggested. "He's probably angry with me, but he'd come if he knew you were hurt."

"Not the point. I'm fine. It isn't like I'm going to lay here and starve to death and there's nothing anyone can do about my leg. It will either improve or it won't. I'll go put it up in a minute. Right now I'm going to figure out what's up with this desk. That's the second time today I've heard that sound, and either I'm finally losing it completely or someone is trying to tell me something."

"I'm not trying to tell you something," Tony protested. "I didn't even hear it."

"You told me I have a nice ass," Steve said. He pushed himself back to the desk and began retracing his motions. He didn't put his ear against the side this time. "Maybe you're doing it without meaning to, like the book." He felt around under the desk, feeling foolish. He brushed against the underside of the desk and three knocks shook the room, hard enough to knock the heavy desk against the wall.

"I heard that one," Tony said. He stood back from the desk and some of the solidity leached out of him, leaving him more transparent than before.

"Any idea what I'm meant to be finding? This is more painful than you might imagine."

"I don't know," Tony said. Steve continued to grope around, focused on the underside of the desk now. "When you're in here with me, it's like I can focus again. I remember who I am. I think there have been others here before, but it's all a jumble."

"There were. Some of them picked up on you being here, too."

"I'm not sure I want to remember," Tony admitted. "Why would I want to remember dying?"

"Maybe that would tell you why you're still here," Steve said. The wood seemed to hum under his fingers now, a vibration that got stronger and stronger. His fingers finally caught something small and hard and out of place on the lip of the desk. He ignored the warning jabs of pain and numbness in his leg and the edge of the desk digging into his arm, straining to get a grip on whatever he'd found. He pooped something small and hard out of a niche in the desk and eased himself back into a sitting position.

"Got something," he said, and held it out. It was harmless looking enough, a long narrow rectangle with a metal end, plain black plastic with a normal white adhesive label that said "AC/DC" in a neat, feminine script. "Look familiar?" he asked Tony.

"Great band," the ghost shrugged. "But I've never seen that before. It's a flash drive."

"Is it a sex tape?"

"A what?"

"Well, you seemed like the type."

"I think one or two of those still exist, but I wouldn't hide it in the desk. That doesn't keep it off the internet, believe me. And what do you mean, I seem like the type?"

"The whole debauched billionaire routine. Women and drugs, money and fast cars, guys like that turn up in sex tapes."

"Fair enough. We should put the drive in my computer and see what we've got."

"One problem with that. There's no computer out here."

"There's no computer out here," Tony said with obvious disbelief. "Of course there's a computer out here, I use it all the time…" He swept his dripping arm toward the window, then back to the empty surface of the desk across the room, stricken and confused.

"Things have changed," Steve said. "It's been almost ten years."

"But all my work was in it," Tony muttered. He began to pace between the window and the desk, stepping through furniture without noticing. "Who has my work?"

"I don't know," Steve said. He decided there was no point in standing on ceremony with an agitated ghost in his soaking wet pajamas, and he started to scoot along the floor toward the chaise, holding the drive in his hand. "What was so important on there?"

"I was working on something. Something important. I can't remember but it's right on the edge of my mind. I keep looking for it, but it's not where I left it."

"Rhodes mentioned that they'd had computer problems up here, to the point they stopped keeping one. Was that you?" Tony looked up sharply and paused in his pacing.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe. I can't ever seem to find what I'm looking for. It's frustrating."

"I don't have anything to back this up, but my guess would be Stane got anything of value from the house. Or Thor could have hidden it or something, if he knew to do that."

"Thor didn't know anything about it," Tony said vehemently. "It was dangerous. Nobody knew about it. Except…"

"Except what?"

"Except I told Pepper. Pepper was helping me. She'll know. I'll call her and ask her." Tony paced faster, patting the pockets of his robe for a phone.

"Tony," Steve said.

"Right, right, I'm dead. I'll bring you a phone, and you call her, and I'll only get on if I have to."

"Pepper's gone," Steve said.

"What?"

"It was in the stuff I was looking at yesterday. She's gone. No one has seen her in ten years. Somebody used her passport in Italy right around the time you died, but no one can prove it was her. She's a person of interest in your death, since the cause was undetermined."

"Virginia Potts? Pepper? My Pepper?"

"I'm afraid so."

"How could I forget that? I must have known about it." Tony sank down on the chaise and faded out, his form becoming more transparent.

"It's OK. We'll figure it out," Steve promised. He leaned against the chaise because he knew it was going to hurt like hell to get himself off the floor. He had to lever himself up with his arms and stretch his left out without letting it bend anymore than necessary. He took a deep breath and braced his arms on the seat behind him, trying to work his way up.

"Let me help," Tony said, and before Steve could protest the ghost's hands were on his shoulders, trying to guide him or steady him or whatever Tony thought would be helpful. Instead, Tony's memories spilled through his skin and washed through his mind.

"No one will notice me," Pepper is saying, but Tony finds it hard to believe. She's like a firework to him, tall and poised, vibrant from her bobbing red ponytail down to her sensible pumps. It's impossible that she will pass unnoticed, and she must read the skepticism in his face. "They all think I'm just a dumb intern, someone you keep around so you can get your hands up my skirt," she finishes. She smiles, but not like it's funny. The cynicism doesn't suit her, but Tony can't say that she's really wrong. She's so young, and so beautiful, and she doesn't have any right to be so good at her job.

"It's more to do with how they think of me," Tony says by way of apology. "They think I would give you a job for that."

"But you wouldn't," she says, and her mouth quirks up to show she's joking.

"No, I wouldn't. You don't have to do this," he says. "If you're right, it could be dangerous."

"I know I'm right. But we need proof of what's going on, something they can't bury or hand wave away."

"Something they can't ignore even though it comes from a drunk and his intern," Tony says.

"You aren't drinking, and I'm not an intern. I'm your assistant."

"I'm not drinking anymore," Tony amends. "But I don't have much left in the way of credibility."

"They won't be able to argue with this. Once I have proof of what he's done, you'll be back in control and then we can start to fix things instead of just trying to lessen the damage."

"I still don't believe Obie knows," Tony says. It's the one thing they really disagree on, but he can't believe his uncle, a man his father trusted implicitly, is capable of stealing his work, much less of selling it to terrorists and drug cartels. "There's no denying what we found in Juarez," he says, and they both wince at the memory, of the mass graves and the guns that created them, vanished from Stark Industries factories, non sequential serial numbers that don't exist in any database. "But he couldn't have known they were missing or where they'd end up."

"Or what the buyers meant to do with them," Pepper says. He can tell she's still humoring him. "We'll know soon enough. I know how to get into it, thanks to you, and I mean to get those files."

"And then get out. Without anyone realizing what you did."

"Right," she says.

"I shouldn't be involving you in this. No more than I already have."

"Relax, boss. I can handle it. I'll see you tonight at the party." She winks at him and tosses her hair, straightens her suit and departs, armored in her largely false naivete.

Tony never sees her again.

The memory faded as quickly as it had begun, and Steve was sitting on the chaise with his bad leg cocked at a weird angle. He shook his head and flexed it out, trying to clear Tony's feelings out of his own.

"What the hell was that?" he asked. Tony sat next to him with his chin on his hand, looking at the floor, but he turned to face Steve when he spoke.

"Who was that guy?" Tony asked. "You must have loved him."

"I saw you talking to Pepper," Steve said. "I was you talking to Pepper. What did you see?"

"I was you," Tony admitted. "You were talking to a hot guy with brown hair, in uniform. Joking about stuff, and I could tell you had known him a long time, but it was so sad for some reason. Like you never saw him again."

"Bucky," Steve said. He wanted to get angry, but there was nothing there. The more he learned about Tony, the more he thought they would have gotten along. Not because they were all that much alike, but because they were complementary. Bucky had always looked after Steve, and despite or maybe because he was a genius, it seemed like Tony had needed people to look after him as well.

"Is that his real name?" Tony asked, but he smiled to show he was only teasing.

"James Buchanan Barnes," Steve said. He sighed and shut his eyes. "Everyone except his grandma called him Bucky."

"Something bad happened to him," Tony said. It wasn't a question. With his eyes closed, Steve could see it again, the road, the fire, the ghost. "Like me."

"That's right," Steve said. "Not exactly like you. He died. In Afghanistan. About six months ago."

"You feel responsible for it," Tony said, and again it was not a question. "You've been carrying him around."

"I was responsible for it, and I don't want to talk about it. Not with you." You killed yourself, he thought, and left enough mess behind. Who are you to absolve me of anything?

"Fine," Tony said. Steve could feel him draw away, the sense of his presence fading until he was alone in the room. More alone, to be more accurate, he thought. I was always alone by a sane person's standards. He decided to leave the paper mess for an hour or two and do some sketching, hoping that with Tony miffed at him he could keep control of the exercise and do some simple practice. Tony would be back, of course, since he had an audience now and he hadn't found what he was looking for. Steve put the mysterious flash drive on top of the mysterious Tolkein and focused on his pencil.

He knew it would hurt, but he wished he'd seen his last conversation with Bucky. He tried to remember his friend's smile as he drew, blocking out the guilt and the torn and dismembered corpse he'd seen to bring out Bucky as he'd been in life. He had blocked himself from thinking of him so thoroughly that he hadn't allowed himself any memories of his friend at all that weren't tainted with grief and guilt. No one was here to see him if a tear or two slid down his face as he sketched. He let himself think of the things they had done together, jumping fences and getting into fights and lazy afternoons trying to escape the oppressive heat. Bucky had known something was different when Steve got out of the hospital, something besides Steve's health. He'd believed him about the ghosts, as Steve had known he would, and he was the only one Steve told. They both instinctively knew that others in their rough and religious neighborhood wouldn't be so accepting.

Bucky never questioned him if he said the dead needed him to go somewhere. When a dead woman started following him, Steve tried to ignore her at first, but even though she never said anything, she wouldn't let him rest. He'd seen her around, was the thing. She had a kid, he thought, and she smiled when she had her baby. Her ghost was different, smeared makeup and smeared blood on her face, her cheap, shiny dress torn down the front, bruises fresh and red at the dark skin of her neck and thighs. Bucky went with him to the police station to ask about her, and when he realized they thought she'd left, he went with Steve as he followed her. She led him, slow but inexorable, to a barren lot, overgrown with weeds and strewn with garbage, food wrappers and used condoms and the brittle glitter of shattered glass. They had picked their way across the lot, Bucky watching their backs and Steve watching the ghost, until she stopped and pointed. Her nails had bright magenta polish on them, and Steve still remembered it twenty years later. The nail on her index finger had broken and a dark half-ring of blood and tissue was caked under the ruined, ragged edge. Steve couldn't see, at first, what she was pointing to. The whole lot smelled so rank, of rot and urine and misery, that he couldn't tell anything else from the miasma, but she pointed, silent and still as eternity. He made out a bundle of dull black and reached for it.

"No way, Steve," Bucky whispered. "You have no idea where that's been!" Except he had a pretty good idea. It had been right here, for about the three days the dead woman had been missing. Bucky was right; he'd only been out of the hospital for a few weeks. Steve brushed the edge of the bag. It came open in a sickening rush and they both screamed as a hand flailed at them. He had just enough time to register that the rigid hand bore a familiar jagged magenta nail before the smell hit them. They ran off to be sick and summon the police, and because they were best friends they managed to come up with a story about playing in the lot that actually held together under questioning. Steve's mother had forced him to promise never to do something so dangerous again, and he had given his word. It was one of the only times he's lied to her, because no matter what he did they kept finding him. Bucky got him to make a more realistic promise: that he wouldn't follow the ghosts alone, no matter how they threatened or pleaded with him, and he'd kept that promise until Bucky wasn't around to hold him to it anymore.

He sketched through the afternoon as the light faded around him, in a kind of trance as he welcomed the memories and processed them through his hands. His thoughts strayed to the lake outside and the cold, black water ran through memories of Brooklyn summers where it had no business being until he jolted himself free of them, starting back to himself. He had several pages of sketches, some small studies and some half or full page compositions, of himself and Bucky and happier times, but the drawing under his cramped hand was of the lake, as he'd known it would be. It was a different part of the grounds, unfamiliar, but he had no doubt of where it would be if he went looking. The pen he held was damp with sweat and he'd bled it nearly dry, letting the water he'd drawn run in messy blots and smears over the page. He'd left one evocative sliver of white space, barely tinged grey where his ink-stained hand had run over it, and it gave the impression of something pale beneath the surface of the water. It was different from the perspective he'd seen before, but it seemed he'd drawn Tony in the lake again.

"If you like to watch so much, at least come out where I can see you," Steve muttered.

"Maybe I just like to watch," Tony drawled. He appeared on the couch, again nearly solid and swathed in a dripping bathrobe. "Maybe it's my only joy, a lost spirit doomed to wander the earth unless a handsome man wants to get freaky on my couch with a drawing pad."

"I don't mind you watching so much," Steve said, and the ghost snickered. "But I wish you wouldn't influence what I'm drawing."

"Sorry," Tony said. "I can't help it. Hey, I have a question."

"What?"

"Was I wearing underwear when I died?"

"Were you what?" Steve asked.

"Because I sleep nude, or I did, but I have spectral underwear on, so I wondered if I was wearing them when I died or I just imagined them up so I wouldn't have to appear with my spectral dick out."

"I honestly have no idea," Steve admitted.

"You've seen other ghosts before," Tony prompted. "What did they wear?"

"What they died in, mostly," Steve admitted. "Sometimes not, though. Sometimes they had on their normal clothes, like if they died in the hospital I wouldn't see them in a gown. Some of them weren't fully formed enough to make out, either. But you aren't like any other ghost I've met."

"Yeah?"

"You're so…present. It's like you're really here."

"I am really here. That's hurtful," Tony quipped.

"You were flirting with me."

"I can't be the first to flirt with you," Tony insisted. "No one is that dead."

"I assure you that isn't the case," Steve said. "They just want me to do something, and once I do it, they leave me alone."

"Do you want me to leave you alone?" Tony asked. His tone was playful, but Steve could sense the brittle uncertainty in him.

"I just want you to stop messing with my art," Steve said. "Rhodes thinks I'm certifiable by now and this isn't helping. If I get kicked out of here, no one is going to help you find what you need."

"Rhodey bear won't kick you out," Tony said. "I've got enough dirt on him, that's for sure. I don't understand why he can't see me, but you can."

"I don't think anything about this ability is fair," Steve said. "I see total strangers and I help them, but I can't do anything for Bucky. The people you really want to speak to can't see or hear you."

"Life's a bitch even after you die."

"As far as I can tell."

"I don't think you can help me," Tony said. "I don't want anything from you. I just like having you around. Besides, where would I go? Do you know what happens to them after?"

"Way above my pay grade. My mother would have said heaven, or hell. I'm just afraid I'll end up back in Afghanistan."

Tony followed him around all evening. Steve let him pick what he had for dinner and as a result ended up eating a small homemade pizza, a cheeseburger, potato chips, and a warm slab of pie. Tony flitted about the kitchen as he was cooking, watching him and brushing cold ghostly fingers against him as though Steve were a temptation he couldn't resist.

"But I remember cheeseburgers," he insisted when Steve protested.

"OK, but I was saving the pizza."

"Saving it for what?"

"Just…saving it."

"Tell Rosa you liked the pizza, and she will make you another one. If you could eat anything in the world right now, what would it be?"

"I'm extremely full somehow."

"Don't think, just feel it. What do you want to eat?"

"Strawberries," Steve said, and he was surprised to realize it was true. He hadn't had a lot of fresh fruit on deployment, and he'd had to reduce eating to a mostly mechanical process since he got back in order to do it at all. He wanted strawberries.

"So write it on the list. You'll get them."

"It's autumn, they aren't in season."

"Rosa will know where to find some."

"And they will be too expensive. I don't want to bother her."

"Steve…"

"No. I never put anything on the list. Whatever she brings is fine. There's already too much around here for one guy to eat."

"You think you don't deserve them? Steve, you are worth it, OK? You can ask for things. You can ask for help, or strawberries, or whatever. I'd get you some myself if I had my spectral wallet."

"It's not like that!"

"Yes it is. I got in your head when we touched. I know how you think. Write it on the list or I will sing."

"That is so childish."

"I will sing all night. And it's no more immature than denying yourself something for no reason. You're alive! Eat a strawberry, stomp through dry leaves, get a blowjob. I'll turn invisible so you can't see me watching."

"Where the hell am I supposed to get a blowjob?" Steve snapped. He looked at his plate as his face flushed.

"Hell, write it on the list and see what happens. Actually don't, that was a joke. Not that you would. You're young and good-looking and clean, just ask around. I wish…"

"Wish what?" Steve said. He looked up, suddenly alert for a clue to what held Tony's spirit.

"I wish I could give you one," Tony said. He didn't blush, but he faded into more of a vague outline. Steve realized that if he reacted poorly, Tony would likely disappear again. His cock stirred in his pants, apparently unaware that it was a little creepy to be into a dead man.

"Tony, that's not… I want to help you. You don't have to…"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You could have anyone you want. You can certainly afford to hold out for a guy with a pulse."

"Don't go, Tony. I'd like it too. Maybe not so soon, but I would be into you. If we had met under other circumstances, I would…"

"What? You would what?" Tony said. His eyes had gone dark and intense and he leaned closer to Steve.

"I would have dinner with you, for starters," Steve said. "We could see where it went from there."

"We just had dinner," Tony said. "We should spend the evening shagging each other senseless. Or we could go dancing. I know a place. You'd look great in a suit."

"I'm not big on dancing," Steve said. "Not anymore."

"I can go all night," Tony said. Something in Steve's face must have given him away, because Tony continued. "I'm sorry. I got carried away thinking about it."

"It's ok," Steve said. "There are things we can't change, and wishing doesn't help it."

"Speak for yourself. Thinking is all I have now," Tony said. He watched Steve limp around the kitchen doing the dishes and despite his bravado Steve didn't think Tony was imagining sex. He didn't know how to help a ghost who knew he was dead and wanted to live again. He dried the dishes slowly, lingering over the task and thinking. He found he was imagining, and even wishing, though he'd just told Tony it didn't help.

"I wish we could go dancing," Steve said. "This is about the weirdest way to get a date I can think of, but I wish we could." 

"I'm going to say that's a date, then," Tony said, his voice wistful. "Who knows what we'll do? I, at least, have all the time in the world to figure out how you can still date me."

Steve went back to the work room and sat on the chaise. Wind sighed through the trees and the normally mirror smooth and placid water of the lake whipped into ripples outside.

"Must be the storm Thor told me about," Steve said. Tony wasn't as visible now, but Steve could still feel him around.

"It won't get here until tomorrow night," Tony said with confidence.

"How do you know?"

"I just do," Tony said.

"It's going to be a bad day for my leg then. It hates the damp, or the pressure change or something. Stormy weather sets it off."

"What happened to it?" Tony asked. The end of the chaise dented in, and Steve could see Tony's shadowy outline.

"I got blown up," Steve said. "That's the short answer. My convoy got ambushed and things went bad real fast. Bucky...Bucky protected me. I was lucky to even keep the leg as it was. Plenty of the guys who were there that day never made it."

"Is it going to get better?" Tony asked.

"Probably not," Steve said. Why lie to a dead guy? He knew more about what had happened to Tony than Tony did, and he found it didn't bother him so much to say it to him. "The joint's not good anymore. If it recovers some, I can get a knee replacement, maybe."

"Then you can dance?" Tony asked, gently. Steve scoffed, chuckling even though nothing was particularly funny about it.

"Sure, then I can dance. If it gets worse, or if I hurt it again, they might have to fuse it totally. Sometimes I wish they'd just amputate it."

"I wish I had my laptop," Tony said. "I could show you what I was working on, before. No one else knew much about it. Rhodey knew the general outline, and Thor I told all sorts of stuff about it because he just tuned most of it out, but you would appreciate it."

"Tell me about it," Steve said. Maybe it was related to the reason his spirit was still here. Even if it wasn't, Steve wanted to hear him talk some more.

"It was, well, a metal suit," Tony said. "I had a request from the Air Force to work on propulsion systems, so of course I started building rocket boots."

"Like you do," Steve said.

"Exactly. Like you do. And the more I worked on those designs, for a one-man weaponized suit of body armor, the more I thought it would be better as a way to help people like, well, amputees, or paraplegics. Even quadriplegics, or bilateral amputees. They would have an AI to help them control it."

"And rocket boots," Steve said. He couldn't help but smile.

"Rocket boots make everything better," Tony said, and Steve could hear the smile in his voice.

"So what happened to it? No one at the VA hospital said anything to me about rocket boots."

"That's just it, I don't know. I had my work on a laptop I kept here, protected. I wrote it in code. I don't know where it went. I think...when I get confused, I'm looking for it here, but I never find it."

"Do you think Thor hid it?"

"Thor?"

"He found you. In the lake. Would he have hidden your work?"

"No wonder he can't hear me," Tony said. "If I'd found him like that, I would...I don't know what I would have done. And he might have, but I don't know where."

"If he didn't it's likely up at the mansion."

"Maybe. But they didn't know what I had, or what code I used."

"We'll look," Steve promised. "Is that what worries you? You can't find your unfinished work?"

"Don't try and ghost whisper me out of here," Tony warned. "This is still my house."

"I'm not going to argue with you on that," Steve said. He was full, the room was warm, and Tony was as peaceful a presence as he could be. The wind sighing and rustling outside even seemed more soothing than ominous for once. Tony's cold hand touched his bad leg, but it had no weight and didn't hurt.

"Does it bother you? I can stop," he asked. "But I like it."

"Don't stop," Steve murmured. "It feels good. Like an ice pack." His skin prickled under the spectral touch, but it brought the blessed relief of numbing cold as well. He slipped into sleep, and for the moment he could even forget that it was no living man stroking his leg.


	5. Chapter 5

In his dreams, Tony was no ghost. His hands were warm, and they roamed over Steve's body, exploring his skin and running fingers through his hair. He leaned into the touch, finding everything he wanted in the embrace, and for those fleeting moments he had an idea of what it would be like to hold the living man in his arms.

Tony's hand circled his neck, pulling him close for a kiss, and Steve dreamed his eyes shut, waiting for the feel of soft, yielding lips, but then, without warning, the dream changed. He wasn't himself anymore, and it wasn't Tony who held his neck. A face, pale and blank as a skull, looked down on him, and sharp, relentless hands held his throat in a crushing grasp. 

He struggled against them, slapping and scratching and kicking, and he tried to scream or plead for his life, but nothing came out. Nothing he did had any effect on the face of his attacker- his killer- who looked on with vague interest as he choked the life from Steve's body. He fought for air, for even a few more seconds of life, but the man was too strong. His vision went dark and his lungs burned, his last thoughts bursting into pure animal terror, and then he died.

He woke up on the floor and couldn't remember how to breathe. It was impossible to breathe, he was dead. His neck felt raw, bruised, almost like the hands were still there, strangling him, and his head stung where he'd smacked it on the floor. A spasm went through him and he sucked in a gasp of air, which turned to violent coughing when it hit his tortured throat.

"Steve? Steve!" Tony was next to him, a faint luminescence in the dark room. Steve swatted at him and lurched away, afraid that Tony's touch would send him back into the dreamscape to go through it all again.

"Tony," he choked out, still half gagging whenever he drew breath. "Tony, what the fuck was that?"

"I don't know!" Tony stayed back, but he still watched Steve, his dark eyes wide with concern. "It wasn't me! I swear, I wasn't doing anything. What even happened?"

"I need to get out of this room," Steve said. He hauled himself up on the chaise and did not look out the window. He couldn't bear to see the lake right now. He hopped and limped across the room and groped his way up the stairs in the dark house. The bedroom was usually safe, but he went first to bathroom at the top of the landing and flicked on the light. The dim wash of yellowed light still blinded him for a moment. He gripped the cold porcelain of the sink and squinted into the mirror.

Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his pale skin had a sickly cast in the light, but he wanted to check his neck. He expected the red of fresh bruising, pale where the pressure had been and blotched with purple where blood vessels burst below the surface, but that was not what he saw. His throat, from his collar bone up to his jaw, was covered in dark rings that resolved into hand prints as he studied them. It looked like a large man had tried to strangle him with hands dipped in black paint, or charcoal dust. He touched them and found them icy cold, each brush setting off a vague echo of the dream in his head. They began to fade as he stood in front of the mirror, but the pain and fear didn't dissipate as quickly.

Tony stood outside the door, dripping his phantom water on the landing.

"Steve?" he asked. "Are you OK? What happened?"

"I'm OK," he said, his voice rasping in his raw throat. At least he had stopped coughing. "I saw something. I lived through a murder, but I don't think it was you."

"Me either," Tony said. "I think I would remember being murdered."

"There were no signs of manual strangulation on you," he said. He didn't want to go too much into detail for Tony, not unless he asked, and he never had. He needed to remember what happened on his own. Then something occurred to him. "I don't think I've ever seen you upstairs," he said. Except for the night with the shower, and he couldn't entirely eliminate a mundane plumbing problem as the reason for that.

"I...I don't think there's anything up here for me usually," Tony said. "It's like I just remembered this house even had an upstairs."

"You followed me?" Tony nodded. He looked more like a ghost up here, but his presence was just a strong.

"I was worried," Tony said. "I thought something was attacking you."

"Something was," Steve agreed. "There's something else here. Maybe someone else." He picked his way over to his bedroom, the only room in the house where nothing weird had happened. He sank onto the bed and noticed Tony was still at the other end, hovering, quite literally, at the threshold.

"Can I come in?" Tony asked.

"Do you want to?" 

"Yes. But I think you need to say it's OK." Steve sighed a little. He felt he would be giving up his last place of refuge, but Tony...Well, he wanted Tony by his side, ghost or not.

"Come in, Tony," he said. "Please. It's OK. You can follow me anywhere I go, if you want." Tony drifted in, touching the windowsill and the desk before sitting on the bed. Steve could hardly see him now, mostly just the outline of his face, but he still left a dent in the mattress.

"What are you going to do?" Tony asked. "Are you going to leave? You probably should. Bad enough I'm here, but that...Whatever that was, I thought it was going to kill you."

"I think I experienced a memory," Steve said. He had his suspicions, but he kept them to himself. "Tomorrow, I'm going to do something I haven't been dumb enough to do since I was a teenager," he said.

"Jaeger Bombs?" Tony joked. "Unprotected ghost sex?"

"No," Steve said. He smiled in spite of himself. "I'm going to make a spirit board, and see if I can talk to it. Find out who it is and what it wants."

"Is that safe?" Tony asked.

"Not in my experience," Steve said. "That's why I haven't done it since I was a kid. There was this girl at our school, and she heard about me somewhere. She came to me and said there was something in her family's apartment. Something bad. I wanted to help, so Bucky came along and we tried to reach out to it with a board."

"What happened?"

"I don't remember, but something went wrong, or went too well. I remember getting there and setting up, and then I remember Bucky slapping me, and he was more freaked out than I'd ever seen him. He put up with all the ghost busting, as he called it, but he made me swear to him I would never invite something like that again. I shouldn't try it alone."

"You won't be alone," Tony said. "I'll be here."

"Will you knock me out of it? Can you knock me out of it?"

"Maybe we should ask Rhodey," Tony said, staring at the floor through his invisible feet.

"I'm sure he's going to agree to do a seance with me, no problem," Steve said sarcastically.

"Ask Thor, then," Tony said. "If you tell Thor something scares you, he'll help, even if he thinks it's nuts."

"We'll see," Steve said. "Right now I'm tired and my neck hurts. "I'm going to try to sleep and hope nothing else weird happens tonight."

"I'll be here, for what that's worth," Tony said. "There should be a one-ghost limit."

If he said anything else, Steve didn't hear it. He fell asleep, and he didn't have any dreams he could remember.

He woke up late, to the sound of rain hitting the windows and someone knocking at the door.

"Tony?" he said. No answer. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He tentatively touched his neck, but he didn't find any bruising, just his throat dry and scratchy from coughing. The knocking came again and he combed his fingers through his hair and made a mostly futile effort to smooth the wrinkles out of his clothes, the same ones he'd been wearing the day before. He reached for his cane and swore when he remembered it was downstairs still. He hobbled to the stairs and started down them, slowly.

"I'm coming," he called. When he opened the door, he found Thor on the porch, sopping wet, and his motorcycle pulled as much into the shelter of the house as possible. Just beyond the porch, cold rain fell in wind driven sheets and tore the bright leaves from the trees, leaving behind dark woods full of skeletal trees and brooding pines that shook and bent in the storm. He gestured for Thor to come in and shut the door before too much of the chill and damp could invade the house.

"What are you doing out here?" Steve asked. "It can't be safe to drive in that." Especially on a bike, he thought.

"I came to make sure you were alright," Thor said. "I got a call from the house number, but there was no response when I answered it, and no one picked up when I called back. I was worried something had happened to you." Thor stood just inside the front door, dripping water that puddled on the floor. I should get him a towel, Steve thought. Offer him a change of shirt. But all of that was upstairs, and he wasn't sure he could face it.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't call, and the phone never rang. I was asleep when this got started, if you can believe that. Do you want a towel, maybe? I can get one. You can probably wear my clothes, too, but they might be tight." They would definitely be tight. Thor had some of the broadest shoulders he'd ever seen, but they were about the same height.

"I shouldn't bother you, then," Thor said. "It's so isolated out here, and you don't even carry a cell, and I thought...But never mind, you are safe."

"Do not go back out there," Steve said. "You're crazy for driving in that in the first place. But thank you."

"Then I will happily take a towel," Thor said. "But I can get it myself, if it's alright with you."

"Sure, help yourself. There's some clean shirts in the wardrobe if you want," Steve said. It was still strange to him, that people asked him for permission to enter the house, because he didn't think of it as his. Thor first went into the work room and picked up Steve's cane and handed it to him without a word. When he came back down, Steve had settled himself on the chaise with his leg up and his cane at his side. Thor had on one of Steve’s T-shirts and a ratty pair of sweatpants he'd never seen before.

"I thought these might still be kicking around here," Thor said. "I never have gotten all my stuff out."

"I'm glad you have them. Want lunch?"

"Always." Steve started to get up but Thor gestured for him to stay comfortable. He could hear his footsteps creak down the hall and the rustle of him getting things in the refrigerator.

"You have to tell him," Tony said. He appeared at the other end of the chaise.

"He'll think I'm insane," Steve said, whispering. Thor would think he was insane regardless if he heard him having a conversation with thin air.

"It doesn't matter what he thinks. He'll help you. Then we can find out what that other thing is and get it to leave, and it will be safe for you to stay here."

"It's not that easy, Tony, I never tell anyone about the..." He stopped because he heard Thor's footsteps coming back down the hall. Thor came in and handed him an enormous ham sandwich and sat at the desk with his own. Steve tried to keep his eyes off of Tony, shuffling and gesturing without noise, because Thor still clearly could not see him. They ate in silence for a few minute, listening to the sound of the rain rattling against the windows and the roof.

"Tell him!" Tony said. Steve ignored him, and kept eating. 

"Tell him or I'll start singing," Tony threatened. Steve sighed and looked up. Thor was watching him, eyes unreadable.

"Thor," Steve started. "Can I ask you for a favor?"

"Of course," Thor said. "Anything you need."

"I need to have seance," he said in a rush. "And I don't want to do it alone."

"A seance?" Thor sounded confused. He set the last of his sandwich down on the plate and waited for Steve to explain, but he didn't insist he was crazy or reject the idea right away.

"I can speak with the dead," Steve said. Thor nodded, accepting this without comment.

"Tell him about me," Tony said.

"And I've been seeing a ghost here. Tony's ghost."

"I thought so," Thor said.

"You did?"

"Yes. Other artists have asked me about it, and Rhodey wouldn't hate it so much if he really believed it was just a story with nothing behind it. Can you truly speak to him?"

"I can. He's here right now."

"Prove it," Thor said, a desperate sort of hope in his eyes. "Tell me something you couldn't know otherwise. I have to know this isn't some sort of cruel joke."

"Point Break," Tony said. "Tell him Point Break."

"He says Point Break," Steve said. Thor's eyes widened, but he shook his head, unconvinced.

"He did call me that," Thor admitted. "But it was no secret. Even Rhodey knows that." Steve looked to Tony for more. If he wanted Thor to go through this with him, he would have to come up with something deep.

"Tell him you know about Belgium, and why we really got kicked off the school trip. Tell him you know about the heart-shaped scar on his inner thigh where his dad made him get the tattoo removed."

"He says you got a tattoo in Belgium and got kicked off a school trip. You have a scar on your thigh where it got removed." Thor stared at him, his face open as he accepted that Steve was telling the truth.

"That's right," Thor said. "We snuck out one night after curfew and got a little drunk. I...we were young, we had been fooling around and it was the first time for both of us. I don't remember whose idea it was, but we decided to get matching tattoos with each other's names, but when we got to the shop there was no way they would believe he was old enough. I got one anyway. When we got sent home, my father...said it was disgraceful. He made me get it removed, and never tell anyone where I got the scar."

"He was so upset about it," Tony said. "He swore he would do anything to make it up to me, but I never called it in. Tell him I'm calling it in now."

"Tony says he's calling in the favor now," Steve said. Thor looked at him, stricken.

"I would have helped you anyway," he said. He straightened up and rubbed his eyes. "Can he hear me?"

"Yes," Steve said. "And he knew you would help. That's exactly what he told me."

"Tony?" Thor said, looking around. "Where is he?"

"Tell him I'm right next to him," Tony said. He floated over to stand at Thor's shoulder, but hesitated to touch him.

"He's standing next to you," Steve said.

"Tony, why did you never come to me? All these years, I've been coming here, looking for you, and I never saw you." He reached out his hands blindly, passing right through Tony's body. "It's cold here. Is that him?"

"Yes, that's him," Steve confirmed. "He doesn't remember any of that. I don't know why I can see them so well, but when I got here he didn't even realize he was dead. I think whatever it is that makes me able to see them also gives them strength, but I've never met a spirit that was so aware. It's not because he was angry with you or anything."

"Does he remember...the night it happened?"

"No. But I think he's looking for his laptop. He said it had some work on it that he hadn't finished, and he didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands. Do you know where it is?"

"I don't. I knew he kept it here, but I couldn't find it. I pulled him out, and I tried to revive him, I really did, but I was too late. He was cold already. After I called 911, I tried to get to it, to secure it, but it wasn't in the house. I haven't seen it since."

"Did you tell the police about it being missing?"

"No," Thor said. "I didn't trust any of that. Tony had been acting strangely before he died, restricting his circle to just a few people he really counted on." Thor ducked eye contact with Steve, and he didn't think he was lying, but he again thought Thor knew something he wasn't telling.

"I wish he could hear me," Tony said. "I can't believe he's still so sad. I don’t know what I would say to him, but he deserves to hear it from me."

"But I don't understand," Thor said, talking over Tony. "If you can speak to him so clearly, why do you need to do a seance? What do you need me for?"

"It's not Tony I need to talk to. There's something else here, something darker. I think it's another spirit, but missing the personality. It's just angry, and it's getting stronger the longer I'm here."

"What do you need me to do?" Thor asked. Just like that, Steve had him on board.

"This is the room where most of it happens, so let's set up in here."

They decided to use the desk. It had been involved earlier, when he heard the knocking, and Tony insisted that hadn't been him. Thor set up one of the kitchen chairs and Steve rolled out a big piece of brown paper across the surface. He carefully marked it with the letters of the alphabet, numbers one to zero, a "yes" and a "no", and a "goodbye" at the bottom. He added a sun and moon, just for artistic flourish, and maybe to kill a few minutes of time.

"Don't we need something special?" Thor asked. "Candles or something?"

"We don't need candles as long as the power stays on."

"It will. It's buried cable, and we're still connected to the generator at the mansion that kicks on if the supply gets interrupted. Don't we need a...a thingy?" He gestured with his fingers gliding across an invisible table.

"A planchette," Steve said. "We can use a glass. It doesn't have to be fancy. The last time I made a spirit board, I used the back of an old math test and a cigarette lighter." Thor went to the kitchen and came back with a low tumbler. He held it out to Steve for approval. "That will work."

"What can I do to help?" Tony said. He had watched them get ready with impatience, since he couldn't hold on to anything.

"Tony, you should probably make yourself scarce," Steve said. The heavy storm had brought an early dusk, and lightning split the sky behind the denuded trees.

"Oh, come on, Steve," Tony said, flitting back and forth. "It's my house. I want to know who's in here with me. Besides, I've never seen a real seance. It's for science."

"You might interfere, though," Steve said. "What if it tries to hurt you, or gets angry that you're here and hurts one of us?"

"Can it hurt me?" Tony asked. He didn't sound frightened. He was intrigued by the possibility.

"I don't know, maybe! I don't want to find out! Sorry, Thor," he said, realizing that Thor was patiently watching him yell at nothing.

"It's all right. That certainly sounds like Tony."

"Hey! So Steve, what if I stand back, don't touch the thing at all, and just remember what it spells out? That would be helpful, right?"

"Sure, OK, Tony, you be in charge of writing down the message. Metaphorically writing down the message. But once we get started, if I say you have to go, you go. Deal?"

"Deal," Tony said. He took up his position about four feet from the desk, hovering over it so he had a good view looking down at the board. "Check this out. Don't even need rocket boots."

Steve and Thor took their places, one on each side of the desk, and Steve turned the glass over. Both of them placed the tips of their fingers on it, applying barely any pressure.

"I think it would be better with candles," Thor said.

"Noted," Steve replied. 

"Should something be happening?" Tony asked. Steve ignored them both. He didn't have special words to say for this, or anyway to really attract whatever was there to contact them. He took a deep breath.

"Spirit? Are you there?" he asked.

"I'm here."

"Shut it, Tony. Spirit? I know you are trying to tell us something. Are you present tonight?" A deep, damp chill settled over them, and the glass frosted over. It quivered under their fingers and shot to YES. Thor stared at him, as though he'd believed him but not truly thought this would work at all."

"Why are you here?" he asked.

M-U-R-D-E-R, the planchette spelled out, the glass rustling as it slid over the paper.

"You were murdered?"

YES, it indicated.

"What do you need from us?" he asked. He would have liked to confirm who it was, get some more detail, but he could feel the anger and tension rising in the room and he didn't think they had a lot of time for small talk.

L-A-K-E, it spelled.

"Tony, knock it off," Steve said.

"It's not me," he insisted. "I'm not even thinking about it."

The planchette circled, hovering over the same four letters, then it did it again. It began to repeat, LAKE LAKE LAKE, over and over, and Steve and Thor seemed unable to pull their hands away. It shot down to GOODBYE and flew off the desk entirely, tearing the paper with its force. The glass hit the wall behind the desk and exploded into a spray of glass. Steve and Thor looked to each other, but before either of them spoke, the light in the room went out, plunging them into frigid darkness. Water slopped against the windows as the storm intensified, leaving a wash of grey twilight for them to try to see, and then the pounding began.

Steve and Thor both jumped, and Steve immediately looked to Tony, who was still in the room, his form faded and his face uncertain. The pounding came again, a series of three slamming knocks that shook the whole house.

"That's not me either," Tony said. Steve and Thor nodded at each other, and Thor stepped out of the room first. Steve picked up his cane.

"Stay here," he told the ghost. He followed Thor and hoped he would listen.

The hallway was much darker, without any windows to let in the little bit of light from outside. He and Thor crouched in the deeper shadow of the stairs, and waited a few seconds. Just when it seemed like it would not do it again, the sound came, and they could see the door vibrate with the force of the blows. This time it didn't stop at three, it kept going, slamming against the door over and over. Thor took another step closer.

"What are you doing?" Steve whispered. "What if it kills you?"

"I wasn't doing much with my life anyway," Thor said, but he didn't look away from the door. The knocking stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and whatever was outside tried the knob. It rattled and twisted, but it didn't open.

"Is the door locked?" Thor asked. He still didn't turn away.

"Should be," Steve said. It gave up on the knob and began to make a sound that was quieter than all the others, but much worse. It was scratching at the door, long nails rasping and scraping for purchase. Steve moved up to stand next to Thor, holding his cane like a club even though he didn't think anything human was out there. They took the last steps together, until they were only a few feet from it.

"What should we do?" Thor asked. "I think it knows we're here. You're the expert at this." Steve shook his head. He didn't know what to do with this.

"What do you want?" Steve shouted. The scratching stopped, then another, thunderous slam shook the door, and black water rushed under the door in a flood, bringing with it the familiar metallic smell of the lake and a heavy stench of putrid flesh. Steve covered his mouth with his sleeve to keep from gagging and reached for the knob.

"Steve, no!" Thor shouted, and grabbed for his hand.

"We have to know," he said. "We have to find out what it wants!"

"I think it wants to kill us!" Thor said, muffled by his own arm. The water slowed, but didn't stop, gurgling under the door like a throat being crushed. The blows resounded against the house again and vibrated in Steve's chest, but this time they were not at the door, but traveling down the side of the house back toward the work room. 

"The window," They said in unison. They ran back to the room and stopped short, their feet crunching on the broken glass. A figure stood silhouetted against the window, pounding and scrabbling against the glass. A flash of lightning behind it lit it up in a moment of horrifying detail. A woman's corpse stood there, drenched beyond rain, her empty eye sockets staring in at them. Much of her flesh was missing, but a sodden mess of scarlet hair hung around her face, threaded through with lake weeds and plastered with leaves. 

Steve found that he and Thor were holding on to each other, but he didn't remember that happening. Tony stared at the horror with a blank expression, devoid of all hope. Now that they saw her, she knocked more insistently on the glass.

"She...I think we're supposed to follow her," Steve said. He and Thor unlinked without saying anything about it and cautiously approached the big window. When they crossed to the chaise, he could see more detail of her rotted clothes, her missing flesh. Her face and hands were almost fully skeletal, and below the remnants of her shirt her torso fell away sharply under her ribcage. A tweed skirt hung loosely from her hips, and something gold glinted near her neck and caught his eye. Her throat, though decomposed and bloated from time in the lake, clearly showed rings of black bruising where her throat had been crushed. 

She turned away from them, breaking the spell like hold she'd had over them, and she walked away. Steve expected her to lurch, but she glided with a boneless grace across the lawn, out into the grey dusk. She walked out over the water, crossing in a line to the bank directly below the mansion. She turned back to face them, to make sure they saw where she stood, and dropped into the water without a ripple.

"I think that was Pepper," Thor said after a moment. They stood in the dark, and though the storm still raged outside, the silence in the house was almost painful.

"I suspected as much," Steve said. "But I wanted to be wrong."

"She's been in the lake the whole time," Thor said. "She never made it anywhere."

"No," Tony said, flat, and Steve heard the lake in his voice. "No, it can't be."

"Tony," Steve said gently. "I think you know it's true." He'd never even met her, but he recognized her. 

"Pepper would never hurt you," Tony said. "She wouldn't choke you, or scare people, or drive someone crazy."

"She's not like you," Steve said. "It's not all of her. She died angry, and she's never gotten justice, and that lingered. I think if we look where she showed us, we'll find her body."

"I killed her," Tony said. He was fading away with his heartbreak, and as he did, a puddle of water formed on the floor beneath him.

"You didn't kill her," Steve said. "I know you didn't."

"I might as well have done it myself!" Tony screamed, and a roaring sound rushed through the house and shook the windows. Thor looked around, startled.

"I thought I heard him," Thor said.

"He didn't know she was dead," Steve said.

"I got her involved! She died because of me! All of this- everything that happened- ALL OF IT WAS ME." Tony came apart in a spray of water, and a ball of invisible force shot out from where he'd been. It slammed into the huge window and shattered the bottom corner of the glass, shrieking across the lawn. It traveled down the dock, rattling the old weathered boards, and plunged into the lake with a huge splash.

Wind and rain buffeted Steve and Thor as the storm came through the open window.

"Tony!" Steve called out the window, but there was no response.

"Shit, shit SHIT," Thor muttered. He looked around the room and thought quickly, dumping the contents off one of the bookshelves so he could take the wooden shelf and cover the hole with it.

"That's not going to hold," Thor said. "But it's better than nothing."

"We should go look right now," Steve said.

"We can't, Steve, look at it out there. It's getting dark. It won't be safe. Let's stay in here for now, until the storm lets up, and then we can go look. See what she wanted to show us."

"We have another problem."

"Yes," Thor agreed. He wiped the rainwater out of his eyes and wrapped his afghan around his shoulders.

"That's on the Stark Industries side of the lake," Steve finished, even if he didn't need to say it. "But I'm still going. I understand if you don't want to. We could get arrested, or worse."

"As I said, I wasn't really using my life anyway. Besides, Tony called in his favor, and I will see this through. I liked Pepper. She was a good soul, and good for Tony. I want to know what happened to her."

They went to the kitchen by unspoken agreement. Steve sat slumped at the kitchen table and Thor pulled a couple of sodas out of the dark refrigerator. He sat with Steve and handed him a bottle.

"I wish I had brought some beer," he sighed.

"Yeah. Or at least we could make some coffee. I thought you said the power didn't go out here."

"It shouldn't," Thor shrugged. "But what can you do?" They drank in silence, lost in thought. Neither of them mentioned sleeping that night.

"Is Tony gone?" Thor asked.

"Right now," Steve said. "He'll be back. I hope."

"He wouldn't have hurt her," Thor said. "But I'm sure he blames himself."

"Of course," Steve said. "But it's not his fault. She was trying to help him, and I think she found out something she wasn't supposed to know."

"When the rain stops," Thor said, "We will see what we can see."

They sat, in the dark, and listened for it.


	6. Chapter 6

The storm kept on until the middle of the night, maybe two or three in the morning. It didn't taper off, but stopped like someone had closed the tap. Wind still sighed in gusts through the dripping trees, but the lightning had pounding rain had passed.

"Are you ready?" Steve asked. Thor had found them a few candles in a closet somewhere, and a waterproof flashlight with fresh batteries. The house had gone cold, dark, and silent, even more so now that the white noise of the storm was done.

"This is an objectively terrible idea," Thor said. He stood up and put the blanket over the back of his chair.

"Yes it is. You can stay here. No one would blame you."

"The same is true for you. More so, because you could still get out unscathed."

"Well, if I'm honest, I wasn't using my life for much either."

"Then let's go."

They couldn't walk over the water like the ghosts did, so they went around. They both listened for any guards approaching, but no one moved in the quiet, misty night. Steve didn't bring his cane. If he had to run, he would either make it or not. Thor kept the flashlight off and guided him along the edge of the path.

"Is this it?" he whispered. Steve took a step toward the bank and walked into a wall of numbing cold.

"Yes," he said. "This is it."

"OK," Thor said. "You keep watch. I'll do the diving."

"I should do the diving," Steve insisted.

"You have a bad leg," Thor pointed out. "And I'm from Asgardia, home of the original Polar Bear Plunge. I'll do it." Thor stripped off his shoes and walked into the lake, mist swirling around his thighs as he did. He went out a few feet and then dropped under the water suddenly. He came back up, a puff of steam escaping from his mouth, and began to tread water.

"It drops off here," Thor said. "I can't tell how deep it is. I'm going down to look." He drew a breath and dove, kicking his way below the surface. Steve could only watch and wait, and he saw the flashlight come on deep in the lake. It seemed like hours passed, and then the light went out. Steve jumped to help somehow, but Thor shot to the surface and swam to shore. He stepped out of the water, dripping, steam rising from his body, and shivered.

"Anything?" Steve asked. He realized that not all the water running down his friend's face was from Stark's Pond. He was crying.

"I found her," Thor said, his voice hitching with cold and grief. He held out his hand, pale in the moonlight, and Steve caught a flash of metal. He looked closer and saw it was a necklace, the same one he'd seen on the wraith earlier, though he hadn't been able to make out much detail then. A little golden teapot charm hung on a gold chain, unaffected by it's time in the water. The teapot had a tiny pattern of flowers picked out with engraving and chips of diamond, and initials engraved near the lid- VP. Virginia Potts, missing no more, he thought. He wondered if Maggie Partridge would feel vindication, or grief, or what.

"We have to call someone. The police, I don't know," Thor said. "She'd weighed down with something and I can't...They have to get her out."

"OK, Thor, we will," Steve said. Something clicked behind him.

"No you won't," said a smooth, uninflected voice. They turned but couldn't see anyone, and they hadn't heard anyone coming. The white haired man from the photos hopped down from a platform hidden in one of the trees. Steve expected a gun, but he held a small metal cylinder the size of a lighter, and stood with confident ease even though he had two opponents.

"Who are you?" Steve asked. He reacted with instinctual fear to the narrow, white face, like a death's head, and his eyes, such a pale grey they were almost no color at all. He'd seen him, not just in the photos with Stane. He'd seen him when he was in Pepper's vision. His disinterested face was the last thing she ever saw.

"Joshua," Thor growled, his voice thick with loathing.

"That's Mister Joshua, lapdog. You should have left it alone. You had all this time to forget about it, but you had to find my little hiding place."

"They dragged the lake for her," Thor said. 

"It wasn't down there when they tried that," he said. "I had it in the trunk of a car until everything cooled off. Now, why don't you come back to the mansion? Get dried off? Mister Stane is expecting you." Steve caught Thor's eye and they nodded to each other, barely more than look in their eyes to decide what to do.

"He should get used to being disappointed," Thor said, and he launched himself at Joshua, swinging for vicious body shots. Steve came at him from the other side, but Joshus was fast as a snake and utterly unafraid of them. Thor landed a blow to his kidney that had to hurt, but it didn't slow him down, and when either of them tried to grapple he twisted out of their grip immediately. He didn't drop the cylinder, didn't even use that hand to fight. He broke Steve's grip and set him off balance. His leg came down on a wet patch of leaves and slid. His bad knee bent, then caught and bent some more, until it seemed his kneecap would be on the outside of his leg. He cried out in pain, and Thor wavered in his attack to look for him. Joshua lifted the cylinder, pressed a switch in the bottom.

There was a low hum that vibrated in his nostrils, and then Steve lost all control of his body. His muscles cramped, hard and all at once, then went totally limp, then cramped again. He could feel his leg above it all, twisting and screaming in pain, as he flopped helplessly in the wet leaves, smacking his face against roots and muck. 

"That's the neural disabler," Joshua said. "You can thank your good friend Tony for this. We couldn't have done it without him." At last, the spasming stopped, and Steve lay limp but conscious on the ground. Tremors of stray electrical activity still jolted through his body and made him twitch, but he couldn't move on his own at all.

"Leave them alone!" Tony shouted, as though summoned by his name. He burst from the lake and tried to knock Joshua over, but he rushed through him with a buffeting gale of icy wind and water droplets without much effect. Joshua looked around, confused, but went back to what he was doing behind Steve's back. Joshua picked his body up and began carrying it back toward the path, and Steve couldn't do anything to stop it. He dropped Steve like a sack on top of Thor in the back of an off road utility vehicle, while Tony's blasts of cold and wind assaulted him.

"Don't touch him!" Tony howled, but being dead, he couldn't do much about it. Joshua drove them through the night, to a gate, and up the slope toward the dark mansion, where a single window glowed with light. Tony at last gave up and settled in the back with them. "Steve?" he asked. "Are you awake? Are you mad at me? Can you hear me?" Steve was able to grunt a bit, but he was far from able to form coherent words. He only hoped he wasn't smothering Thor, because he couldn't move.

"I can't believe he has my prototype," Tony said. "This is why I need to get my work back. The neural disabler was supposed to to help with surgery, and provide a way to subdue someone dangerous without lethal force! It wasn't meant to cause pain. It wasn't meant to hurt people...people I care about." 

"It's OK Tony," Steve whispered, or tried to. Tony quieted for a moment.

"Im staying with you," Tony said. "Joshua won't get away with this."

Once they reached the house, Steve and Thor were manhandled down the hall to a spacious office looking over the lake, the walls lined with books. A heavy antique desk dominated one wall, and Obadiah Stane sat at the desk. He was a little grayer, a little heavier than the photos, but his dark eyes were just as keen. He was scary, in short, even wearing a red satin robe with a mandarin collar- his pajamas. The desk was empty except for a sleek laptop, the casing worn and scratched and decorated with a vinyl AC/DC sticker.

"Really, Obie?" Tony said. "This was my father's office. And that's my computer!"

"Good evening, gentlemen," Stane said. "Mr. Joshua tells me you found something in the lake."

"Go to hell," Thor growled.

"So rude. I could have had you shot, you know, for trespassing. All sorts of hush-hush things going on."

"What do you want, Stane?" Steve asked. "I don't want to be here all night."

"You must be Captain Rogers. Our resident artist. How charming. I didn't expect to meet you until the gallery show." He tapped the laptop casing. "What I want is this. I want to know how to get into this, how to crack the code."

"You've had it all this time," Thor said. "And you haven't gotten it yet? Tony was always better than you."

"Damn straight," Tony said. "He won't break that code without a lot of luck. He's trying higher and higher tech, I'm sure, but it's so simple he'll never find it."

"I've worked on it, and I've shown it to a few cryptographers who I thought I could trust. No one can break it. I've long suspected that Mr. Odinson here knew more than he was telling, and tonight I mean to find out what. I don't know how you found the girl, but you've obviously been snooping around. What else have you found?"

"I'll never tell you," Thor said. "And he doesn't know anything. Let him go."

"Oh, well, if you say so," Stane said, dripping with sarcasm. "You forget, Thor, that I know you're a liar. So now we're going to play a little game I like to call The Weakest Link."

"Isn't that from a game show?" Steve asked.

"Indeed. But not the way we're going to play. See, I don't doubt you are both brave and stalwart allies, who won't crack under torture. From what I found out about you two, your general existence is a form of torture. Instead, Mr. Joshua here is going to flip a coin, and then he's going to start taking turns with each of you. It doesn't matter to me if you crack from going through the pain or watching someone else suffer, you're going to tell me what I need to know."

"Obie, stop," Tony pleaded. "This isn't you."

"What's that?" Stane asked, looking around. "Is someone else in the house?" He snapped at Joshua. The pale man shook his head. Stane pulled a gun out of his desk drawer and took off the safety. It looked like a .22, small, but perfectly capable of killing them.

"Obie, it's me. Tony. You have to stop," Tony said. "I didn't even believe Pepper when she said you were stealing money, but she was right, wasn't she? She got the evidence she needed, but she didn't get away."

"Tony?" Stane said. He could hear the words, but he couldn't see, Steve thought, because he was looking in the wrong spot. His muscles were mostly back under control now, though his bad leg didn't bear thinking about. Thor still slumped forward, kneeling with his face down almost touching the floor, and his long hair covered his face, stringy and wet from his swim. "Is that you, kiddo?"

"It's me," Tony said.

"I've got your friends here," Stane said. "But I don't want them. I just want your work, Tony. I know you had something you were keeping back, keeping for yourself. You can't keep it forever. Let me have the code, and I'll let them go. I'll finish it for you, whatever you want."

"Don't listen to him," Steve said. "He killed you."

"Did you kill me?" Tony asked.

"Of course not," Stane said. "Losing you was the greatest tragedy in my life. It was like losing my own son."

"He's lying," Steve said. He could tell from his voice.

"No I'm not. I didn't lay a hand on you. Tony, the truth is, much as it pains me to admit it, you killed yourself. I just covered it up to keep your name clear."

"I don't think..." Tony wavered, his form flickering. Steve had never hated anyone like he hated Obadiah Stane.

"If you don't believe me, why don't we ask your old friend Thor? Thor's been lying since it happened. Haven't you? Tell him the truth."

Thor raised his head, sniffing. He looked at Steve as though begging for forgiveness, then back at the floor. 

"You left a note," Thor said. He slumped with the admission as though the weight of the secret had both weighed him down and held him up. "It just said 'I'm sorry' and trailed off and I thought, bad enough that I wasn't here, but to have everyone know…You wouldn't have done that, not in your right mind, so I burned it. I burned it and threw the ashes in the lake before the police and everyone arrived and I never told a soul I had found it, not Rhodey, not anyone."

"I knew I could count on your hound to be faithful even until the end," Stane gloated. The room around him began to hum, faint but unmistakable, a vibration the rattled the widows and buzzed in his hands and knees where he touched the floor. Stane looked around him for the source but the gun didn't waver.

"You thought I jumped?" Tony asked. He did not scream or shout but his voice shook the house, flat and dark and heavy with anger. "All this time, you thought I jumped?" The voice seemed to come from all around them and Thor flinched away, tears dripping from his face onto the carpet.

"I was afraid," Thor pleaded. "It's my fault. If I'd been here, you never would have. You wouldn't have jumped, or fallen, you wouldn't have shot up again. You needed me and I was gone." Thor's shoulders shook and he wrapped his arms around his chest, kneeling on his knees with his face only inches from the floor. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Tony."

"There, you must see the truth now," Stane said. "You fell off the wagon. Again. You got high, you got drunk, and you felt guilty. Whether you meant to or not, you drowned your sorrow, your guilt and shame, and then you drowned yourself."

"You pushed me," Tony said. He turned to face Stane, though Stane didn't know where he was, and the water began to run off his body in rivulets. The room filled with the sound of rushing water that built to a roar like thunder. Even Mr. Joshua reacted now, flicking his pale eyes from side to side looking for the source of the sound as he pulled a gun of his own from his jacket, and Stane looked around wildly.

"YOU PUSHED ME," Tony screamed. His form turned dark and liquid as the lake, his eyes inhuman blackness in the vague suggestion of a face with a gaping mouth that bellowed like a dam breaking. Dark geysers of water erupted from the walls, the floor, even mid air, blasting them all with drenching cold and a smell more like blood than water. Mr. Joshua was knocked out of his stance but not off his feet and he spun to point the gun at the vague black form that now towered over them, but Tony's attention was on Obadiah.

"It was you," he growled, his voice barely recognizable. "You kept throwing them at me, the drugs and the booze and the faithless lovers. You stole my work, you twisted it into things I never meant to exist, and you put them into hands I never would have trusted with them." With each accusation, the towering figure advanced on Stane and the room grew colder, misty and damp, while the water still gushed from all around, running down the walls and raining from the ceiling, flooding the room much faster than it could empty. "I remember now."

Mr. Joshua fired experimentally into the center mass of the figure, but the bullets passed through him into the wall beyond with no more effect than if he'd shot the lake itself.

"I found out what you had done. What you were doing. Pepper didn't come back and you said you were expecting me at that party and I knew. I sent Thor away to keep him safe and then your assassin showed up. He forced me. Forced me to put that… that poison in my body, and write that note, and I STILL didn't believe you could have done it, Obie, I still wanted to believe you didn't know, but he had it. He had the neural disabler and he used it on me. He let me sink into the water and he watched me drown. You know I could still feel everything. I could still think. I know you know that. How could you do that to me? I trusted you, like family."

"You should have let it go, kiddo," Stane said. He shook his head wearily, and the ghost stopped advancing. The sound of the water decreased as though Tony wanted to be able to hear more clearly. "I didn't want to have to lose you, but you wouldn't let it go. Worse than your dad, even, because you couldn't be subtle about it."

"My dad?" Tony asked, and he sounded more like himself. The water was no longer gushing with such violence. It died down to a trickle, like tears, though there was about a foot of it standing in the room. Tony had shrunk to his normal size and faded, and Stane couldn't see him clearly anymore from the way he was looking in the wrong place, but Steve still could. He kept his head down, wary of Mr. Joshua. Men like that were hard to spook but unpredictable once something rattled them, and the sight of Tony's wrath had clearly made an impression. "What about my dad?"

"He didn't have your scruples, but he kept a closer eye on me than I liked. In the end, he had to go. Pity about your mother, but it couldn't be helped. Besides," he said with a disarming grin but his eyes hard as a desert, "I didn't kill anyone. He did. Take your revenge there." Stane nodded toward Mr. Joshua, who seemed unable to register anything so human as fear but looked uncertain, neither of them tracking Tony properly.

"Why?" Tony asked, and Steve could feel the humming vibration building up in the room again. "Why, you son of a bitch? I had a life, damn you. I had a LIFE." The invisible force of Tony's spirit crashed into Stane and propelled him through the glass and out the window, leaving behind a gaping, shattered hole full of glittering shards. Blood ran down the tips of them like teeth and Stane landed ten feet from the window in the damp leaf mold.

Thor sprang into action and tackled Mr. Joshua. The two of them fell into the water, wrestling in near silence for a hold.

"Run!" Thor shouted, but he didn't take his eyes off his opponent. "Steve, RUN." Steve froze. It was Afghanistan all over again, and he knew Thor was right, but he couldn't leave. He pulled himself to his feet but he didn't dare put weight on his knee; he'd wrenched it in the fight before hand and it was so loose it was basically useless, hanging limp, and he knew he'd done something awful to it. He hobbled to where Thor and Joshua thrashed in the black water. Joshua had Thor down on his face and he fought with all his strength just to keep his face out of the water. Steve grabbed him and tried to pull him off Thor. Thor pushed back and headbutted him in the nose, which broke with a wet sound and sprayed blood onto Thor's cheek. Steve's leverage was bad and he had Joshua's attention now. Thor grappled with him again but Joshua let him pull him close, his long pale hands disappearing in the dark water, and Steve realized what was about to happen seconds too late to do anything about it.

The gun went off with a surprisingly soft sound and for a heartbeat nothing happened. Thor lost his grip and crumpled into the water, his blood swirling ribbons of deeper darkness through the water. A wordless scream of grief and rage shook the room as Joshua turned the dripping gun onto Steve. With a single smooth motion, he took aim and fired and Steve closed his eyes, waiting for the bloom of pain and the cold darkness to envelope him again, but it didn't come. He opened his eyes and Tony stood between him and Joshua, as solid as he'd ever seen him, his wet bathrobe swirled around him like wings. The bullet changed course and lodged in the desk several feet away. Tony charged Joshua, who couldn't see him. Tony knocked him away from Thor and he flew backwards into the wall hard enough to punch a hole in the wood paneling, leaving Tony with the gun. Joshua saw the gun, seemingly floating in midair, and despite the massive force of the blow he struggled to rise, or at least sit up against the wall. The gun exploded with the shriek of steel and the shrapnel kicked up droplets from the water as it rained all around them. Tony hovered over Thor, trying over and over to pick him up and hold him out of the water. Steve still wasn't as sure as he would have liked to be that Joshua wasn't a threat, even disarmed and injured, but he went to his fallen friend as well. Thor's face was white and he shivered from the cold. Blood was running freely from a small but lethal looking hole in his chest and Tony was sobbing desperately, unable to stanch the bleeding or pull him from the water. He tried to put pressure on the wound but his hands slid through Thor's skin. Thor moaned in pain and shook harder with chill.

"Help me," Tony begged. "We have to save him."

"Of course," Steve said. "He's going to be fine," he lied. He crouched down as best he could next to Thor, hesitant to switch his weight too completely because he really might not get up again this time, but he pulled Thor up against the desk and ripped his bloody, sodden shirt away from the wound. No sign of an exit, and Steve wasn't sure if that was good or bad at this point, but he ripped a strip from the fabric and pushed it against the hole. Thor cried out and his eyes fluttered open.

"It's OK, Thor," he said. "You're going to be fine. I know it hurts but just hold still, OK? We're going to get help and you're going to be just fine." Thor's eyes widened as Steve tried to slow the bleeding. Tony batted helplessly at Thor, ducking through Steve heedless of the bits and pieces of his memories and emotions that were leaking out of him and bleeding into Steve's mind.

"Tony?" Thor whispered.

"Hey Big Guy," Tony said. Thor reached out to him with his uninjured arm and Tony took, or tried to take, his hand.

"I can see you," Thor said.

"Steve told you I was here."

"But I never heard you, all that time, until now."

"Well, you did something dumb and you're hurt," Tony said.

"You climbed out of your grave to tell me off for getting shot, huh?" Thor chuckled a little, weakly, and his eyes rolled a little as he fought for consciousness.

"Damn right. Don't try to talk. Steve's going to make sure you're ok. He's going to get you to the hospital."

"No," Thor said. He was holding tightly to Steve's hand but he clearly believed it was Tony's, and Steve thought the ghost could feel it as well. "Tony, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please, believe me, forgive me,"

"Thor, there's nothing to forgive. I wanted you to be safe. I can remember it clearly now. I knew if you were here when he showed up you would die. I knew you would die to protect me, Thor, and I didn't want it, OK? I wanted to know you were alive and I still do."

"I miss you so much," Thor murmured.

"I know. I miss you too." Thor's eyes slid all the way shut and he slumped against the desk, no longer struggling, and the bleeding slowed to a trickle.

"I'm cold, Tony," he breathed. "It hurts…" Thor sighed and went still. His hand slipped away and slid under the water.

"How touching," Joshua rasped behind him. "I told Stane we should have gotten rid of that loser years ago, but he insisted he was harmless, didn't know anything and no one would believe him if he did." He stood over Steve, left arm wrapped around his ribs in an awkward hunch, but still deadly. "Guess I'll have to get rid of you the old fashioned way."

He lunged for Steve and Tony moved to interpose himself again, but Joshua stopped short. Steve stood up as well, waiting for him to come and have it out, but the man seemed rooted to the floor. He was no longer paying attention to Steve, focused instead on the water around his calves. He tried to raise his leg but it wouldn't come. A slender, white hand held him fast, emerging from the water and gripping him at the knee. Joshua swung at it with a devastating blow, but his arm passed through the space it should have occupied. He swore and struggled to no avail. The hand held him fast. Another emerged from the water, a slim feminine arm that gleamed white in the dark room. He dodged away from it but the hand struck fast as a snake against the back of his other knee. The leg went out from under him and he splashed into a crouch in the water. He looked down and then he did scream, the full throated sound of abject terror. In the water behind him a grinning skull leered just beneath the surface, empty sockets implacable as the lake, as death itself, and a swirl of copper-bright red hair fanned around it. Joshua fought without thinking, throwing all his strength into the pure animal need to get away from his own death, but it didn't matter. Those delicate white hands pulled him, bit by bit, back into the water. Once he was sitting on the floor the figure surged up and grabbed him by the neck and he was lost. She dragged him over and held him down, face up, barely below the surface of the draining water. Steve and Tony could only watch as his struggle against the skeletal hands wrapped around his neck grew weaker and finally stopped when he inhaled the black water of Stark's Pond into himself.

Joshua stood up but his body didn't. He advanced again on Steve, not noticing that his steps glided through the water without a splash. He looked solid, still sure of his identity and not yet aware that he was dead, but his spirit bore the dark marks of skeletal fingers on his neck.

"I never liked you," Tony told him. Joshua realized he could see him and looked behind him, at his corpse under the water. The red haired skeleton was nowhere in sight now. Joshua shrugged and turned back around.

"Nothing personal," he said. "Just doing my job. I felt bad about your girl," he offered. "That was a waste, to destroy something so beautiful. She wouldn't give you up, no matter what I did to her. I let her die thinking that mattered."

"Looks like she got you back," Tony said.

"People mostly aren't grateful for the favors I do for them," Joshua agreed. "So now what?"

"I don't know what's coming for you," Tony said. "Maybe nothing. I find it hard to believe you even have a soul to go on. But you get the fuck out of my house."

"Think you can make me?" Joshua asked. "You were always scared of me before, and I think I can still hurt you."

"I'm stronger than you are now, and this is my place. Go on, go where you're wanted. Go somewhere you belong."

Joshua looked confused and Steve almost pitied him. Almost. But he thought he knew what was going to happen to him.

The water began to swirl behind him and picked up speed until it formed an impossible whirlpool, a pit of absolute darkness at its center. From the pit came the worst sound Steve had ever heard, and he knew he didn't hear it as clearly as the dead. Moans and shrieks emanated from within the pool, full of rage and pain and despair, and a chill blast of hopelessness sucked all the warmth and light from the room. Steve couldn't breathe looking at the pit and tears ran down his face. He felt the emotions of the lost dead, those who had done too much damage in life, who had died forsaken and alone or with secrets in their hearts, the place angry spirits were afraid of that kept them bound to the earth.

"Steve, shut your eyes," Tony whispered. "Don't look at it. They aren't here for us."

"They?" Steve said. He did what Tony asked, though it was hard to look away and easy to lose himself in that overwhelming negativity. Tony was right; this was not meant for any living eyes.

"There are…things…all around him. He's not as scared as I would be. Big, dark things, like shadows with claws." The noise from the pit grew louder and the emotions buffeted him like an assault. He remembered all the worst things he’d ever done as it blasted him. His mother's death, all the ghosts he'd seen that he hadn't helped, all his fear and rage, pain and grief and hate, and the overwhelming desire to be nothing that had dogged him since he woke up in that field hospital, but even as it tried to tell him he belonged in that pit himself he could tell it wasn't focused on him. Joshua was screaming now, as he experienced all the pain he had caused. Tension in the room dropped as he accepted his fate and Steve heard, far off, the laughter of his captors, his new compatriots. Water rushed against him as it drained rapidly from the room, gurgling as it rushed to fill that bottomless void. With a final shriek it all closed and the room was neutral again, Tony the only unnatural presence within it.

Steve opened his eyes and took in the room around him, sopping wet but no longer flooded. A cool, damp wind blew in through the missing window and rattled the barren branches outside. He found he was holding Thor against him like an anchor, though he wasn't sure if he was holding on to him to keep Thor from getting lost, or himself. He concentrated on the solid feeling of the body in his arms and picked up a faint pulse still within him, sluggish and uneven but still there, and a shallow rise and fall of respiration. Mr. Joshua lay over the spot where the void had opened, flat on his back, empty eyes staring at nothing. His neck was unmarked.

Tony stood between them and Mr Joshua, staring at the solid floor which showed no sign of having been split open to the very core of the world only seconds before. Steve lay Thor back on the squelching carpet and put his jacket over him, but everything in the room was wet and cold and there was nothing he could do for him here. When he had finished tucking him in as best he could, Tony stood over them, his form faded, barely there, but Steve could feel him.

"He's still alive," Steve said. "He needs an ambulance. We have to find a phone." Steve once again hauled himself to his feet on the desk. He wasn't sure how he was going to make it through the house to a working phone, much less how he would explain anything that had happened if he did. He might have to crawl.

"I should have gone in there with him," Tony said.

"What are you talking about? He was a murderer many times over, Tony. He got what was coming to him."

"But Steve, I saw…I saw it, when they were here. Obie was right. I wasted every good thing I ever had. The things I made killed thousands of people, far more than he could have ever killed. I might as well have pulled the trigger myself. I got Pepper killed, and Thor blamed himself, and Rhodey wasted so much time trying to help me, even after I was beyond helping he still tried. All this shit is my fault because I couldn't even see what was happening. I'm still here because I couldn't believe it, even when I was dying. I couldn't believe he would kill me." Shadows coalesced around Tony, forming a pool of familiar blackness. The sound of moaning, shrieking and scraping metal seemed to come from all around them, still far off but zeroing in.

"Don't you dare, Tony. Don't you dare call those things back here." Steve said. "Because none of us have clean hands. Do you think Thor should go with them?" he demanded, and Tony faltered, backing up. He looked at Thor again, saw how thin the veil was over him.

"No, not Thor. Never Thor." Tony shook his head.

"He killed a man. He told me about it. How about me? Should I go down there?"

"You? Never. You're the best person I've ever known," Tony looked at him now, and his form was growing stronger as the sounds seemed to retreat.

"I don't even know how many people I killed. My best friend died saving me and I repaid him by trying to die myself. I see the dead all around me and I might as well join them for all the good I've done, for all that I would matter to anyone. You made mistakes, like we all do, and now you're gone and you can't change them. You're going to have to accept that. But don't deny the good things you did. Leave the mistakes behind and take the love with you."

"You can't think like that about yourself," Tony said, still shaking his head. He took Steve's hand and there was a moment of awful chill that gave way to a warmth like sunshine and he was looking at himself, seeing himself through Tony's eyes. Tony saw a good man, someone beautiful and strong fighting back against a terrible grief, a wound that affected both body and mind. He watched Steve as he drew and painted, his spirit responding to the creative act with longing, drawn out of his own confusion and anger and back to his true self by the work, his presence coming through and marring Steve's work with his own tragedy, his body floating in the lake.

Steve's mind swam, drowning in the warm flood of Tony's love, but he recovered himself. He centered his mind and while he did not reject what Tony was showing him, he sent back what he knew about him as well. He had seen the loyalty he inspired in his friends- Pepper's bravery and sacrifice, Thor's lifelong love and fidelity, Rhodey's unshakable faith and determination. His own time with Tony, brief though it had been, he counted as a blessing as well. Tony had awakened him to the world and he no longer wanted to leave it. He sent Tony his own love back. He regretted they could never have time together in this life as two living men, but he could never regret that he had gotten to know him. He felt Tony's surprise but then he responded and their minds melded in an intimacy beyond words, a moment sweeter than any kiss where they knew each other as though they had spent the lifetime together that they could never have. It broke his heart and healed it at the same time, and he never wanted it to end.

The cold prick of a knife blade at his throat called him abruptly back to himself, his own battered and aching body and a powerful arm clamped around his chest.

"Just give me the code," Stane said. "I know you found it. Give it to me and I'll let you go." The knife sliced into his neck deep enough that warm blood ran down over his collarbone and Steve pulled away from it as much as he could.

"I don't have it," he said. "And I wouldn't give it to you anyway."

"Don't fuck with me," Stane snarled. "I don't know what's going on around here but I've had it."

"Let him go!" Tony shouted. Stane jerked and looked wildly around.

"Tony? You still here?" he asked. "Look, I just want the code so I can read this file. Tell me how to read it or I swear I will cut his fucking throat right now."

"Don't tell him anything, Tony. He's going to kill me anyway, and then he'll use your work to kill more people."

"It's the book, Obie. Return of the King."

"What about it?" Stane asked. The knife relaxed just a sliver, enough that Steve could breathe without fearing for his jugular but not much more.

"Tony, no…" he said.

"You just need the right version of the book. The numbers correlate to the page, the line, and the number of letters on the line and that's how you read it. The flash drive just had a program I wrote to make it faster. It's at the house. Let him go, Obie, don't hurt him."

"Is that right? A bit low tech for you. Come on then, let's take this down and see if it works." He kept the knife at Steve's neck but let go enough to scoop up the laptop from the desk. He pushed it against Steve's chest and Steve held it. Stane dragged him backwards over the window sill and the glass teeth tore his jeans and bit into his thighs. Stane shoved him onto the sloping lawn. "Walk," he snarled, and the knife was still right at his back, ready to slide between his ribs. Steve took a halting, hopping step but his knee buckled and he fell. For a moment he didn't care about anything else, not even a knife in the back could be worse than the pain in his leg.

"Walk," Stane repeated, and he goaded Steve with the knife for good measure.

"I can't," Steve said through gritted teeth. "I twisted my knee fighting with your goon and you fucking stabbing me doesn't make it work any better."

"Tsk tsk, language," Stane said. He grabbed Steve by the collar and started dragging him across the muddy, leaf-strewn lawn towards the lake house. "Don't think about trying anything," Stane said to the air. "He'll be as dead as you are before I even blink."

Steve had never hated anyone the way he hated Stane as he dragged him through the woods. He couldn't keep his one working leg under him and Stane didn't care if he crawled with his arms or just got dragged, but he felt every root and rock and dip in the ground when his knee smacked into it and he couldn't keep from crying out no matter how much Stane snarled at him. He felt Tony at his side but he couldn't hear him and his presence was weak.

"Give it to him, Steve.," Tony said, but his voice was only a whisper. "I can't feel anything. Ever since you kissed me, I can't do anything. There's light all around and…it's like I'm not really here. I can hear Pepper, and I think my mom, but I don't want to go."

"You need to go," Steve said. He barely breathed the words through his gritted teeth. "Tony, go. That's where you belong." I'll probably be along shortly, Steve thought, because he didn't see any way he got out of this alive no matter what he did, and damned if he was helping Stane steal anything else from Tony.

"Shut up," Stane said. He was limping himself,and bleeding from his trip through the window. "The disabler is recharged and I can always freeze you again. I'd have done it already but I don't want to carry you through this."

"I won't leave you," Tony said. His voice had conviction and Steve could see his outline now, flitting along beside Stane. A nimbus of light surrounded him but it didn't touch the trees or the ground. "This is my responsibility."

Stane dragged him up the slope of the lawn. He growled at the broken window of the workroom, then kicked in the remaining glass. He shoved Steve through, into the house.

“Find it,” he snarled. The Return of the King was sitting on the table right where they had left it, slightly puffy with damp, but Stane didn’t notice it.

“I won’t,” Steve said. Stane kicked him in the ribs hard enough that he heard one or two of them crack, and he stalked to the desk. He tore the remnants of the spirit board from the desk and slammed the laptop down on the top, then began pulling the drawers out, rifling through the contents in a blind rage.

“Ha!” He crowed. He held up the flash drive, the sex tape that wasn’t a sex tape. “I went over this house inch by inch but I never found this,” he said. He picked up the laptop and inserted the drive, waiting for it to come on, the blue light of the screen lighting his face and throwing his eyes into shadow. “Now I’ve got it,” Stane said. “It doesn’t matter what they find out. They’ll give me immunity to get to this.”

“It’s just a sex tape, Obie,” Tony said.

Tony moved in the shadows and lunged, knocking the knife from Stane's hand. Stane flinched back, his eyes wild, scanning for the enemy he couldn't see with only the moon to light the scene. Tony buffeted Stane with a hail of invisible blows, striking his face and ripping at his clothes, but Stane held on to the laptop. Steve tried to think of a way to fight back but he was shot, barely able to crawl. There was no where he could hide in the house and no way to call for help. Still, he crawled away from Stane and left him hurling curses and growls at Tony. A ghost couldn't fight like that forever, no matter how angry he was, and Tony had to be nearly exhausted. He made his way across the porch but the stairs were pure torture. Adrenaline sang through his body but he couldn't go on much longer either, and it was important that Stane not get the files. He dragged a wet trail of water and blood over the rough boards of the dock and lay still, waiting and hoping the cold didn't steal too much of his strength.

"Come on, Tony," he whispered to the water. "Bring him to me."

Right on cue the back door slammed open and Stane fled into the night. Blood ran from his nose, black in the moonlight, and his robe hung in tatters from his body. He was still limping, and he still clutched the precious laptop to his chest. Tony's ghostly attack stopped when he reached the porch and Stane froze, chest heaving. He saw Steve on the dock and set it down. He stalked, still powerful despite the limp, over the boards and Steve tried to get up to meet him.

"You. You've caused me no end of trouble with your ghost whisperer crap. Stirring up things that should have stayed buried."

"He loved you," Steve said. "What you did was worse than murder. You took his whole life, even his memory."

"He didn't deserve any of it," Stane snarled. "He was a waste of genius and he inherited everything I'd worked for. I put up with Howard for years, and then his brat turned out even worse." He reached into the remains of his jacket and Steve expected another gun, but instead he drew out the disabler and used it without another word to Steve.

It was worse the second time, with no one to split it with, and Steve couldn't even cry out. Fire washed through his nerves and his whole body locked up. He fell flat on his face on the dock but he couldn't do anything to save himself, to catch himself or rise back up.

"It's like poetry, really," Stane said. He hauled Steve by the collar again, dragging him a few steps to the end of the dock. "A troubled artist with a dark past develops an unhealthy obsession with the famous man who committed suicide here and late one autumn night he decides to follow in his footsteps. I'll be here to see it this time." Stane went to shove him over the edge and Steve's face hovered a few feet over the water. He closed his eyes and waited.

"Forgetting something?" Tony asked behind them. Steve couldn't move or see, but he would have smiled.

"What are you doing, Tony?" Stane said. "You can't mean to destroy it. That's all your work, all that's left of that brilliant mind of yours." Stane tried to sound reasonable, even cajoling, but Tony was done with being manipulated.

"I hear it was wasted on me anyway," he said sadly. Tony hurled the laptop with preternatural strength and it caught Stane in the chest. Both of them flew a few feet and landed in the dark water of Stark's Pond, Stane sputtering and screaming in wordless rage as he splashed, seeking the ruined computer. Steve should have gone with him, because Stane was still holding on to him, but something caught him by the ankle and held fast. Steve was still stuck looking into the water, but the rest of him was on the dock and he was no longer falling in. Bucky smiled back at him, reflected in the water, but not the mangled, shell shocked dead man he usually saw. This was Bucky as he'd known him, in his leather bomber jacket and favorite frayed shirt, both of his arms still on him. He was there for only a blink of time, but Steve knew who had held him back. The disabler wore off a little and he was able to move his neck slightly; as before the larger muscle groups returned to his control first.

"Steve? You OK?" Tony asked. Steve couldn't talk but he managed to grunt. Stane still thrashed and flailed in the lake, sending ripples back to the dock where they sat.

"Help me," he pleaded. "Tony, help me…There are things in the water, Tony, get me out. I swear I'll fix it all, I'll admit everything, just get me out of here!" There were ghosts in the water with him, and Steve could see some of them, while others were only dark shapes that brushed around him.

"Oh, Obie," Tony sighed, soft like his heart was breaking again. He held a hand out to Stane and the man tried to grab hold of him, but his living hand passed through Tony's spectral one. The forms in the water grew more distinct and Steve could make them out now- a burned man in a driver's outfit, Howard and Maria, blackened and charred to nothing but bones, a red-haired woman with a bruised throat, and dozens, perhaps hundreds more, murdered students and civilians from Juarez, women and children from villages in Afghanistan and Timor and Indonesia, anywhere Stane had sent a weapon that had spilled innocent blood, no matter how far afield, they came for him now and their shadowed hands found grips. Stane screamed and splashed to no avail; for every hand he dodged, two more grabbed him. Steve struggled against the disabler's influence, but there was nothing he could do. The man didn't deserve his help, but Steve wanted to pull him out.

It was over in seconds but it felt like centuries. The ghostly hands pulled him under, some even pressing his face down into the black water of the lake. His final scream was cut off as he disappeared there, and he did not resurface.

Tony sat with him as his muscles at last loosened and he got to a sitting position. He wrapped his arms around himself and began to feel all the bruises and cuts he'd acquired. He was soaked and freezing and Thor was still wearing his jacket back at the mansion. He could see flashing red and blue lights faintly through the trees.

"Cavalry's here," Tony said at last.

"What the fuck am I going to tell the cops?" Steve asked.

"Tell them the truth," Tony said, and Steve just glared at him.

"Maybe not all of the truth," Tony amended.

"Don't suppose you want to talk to them," Steve said.

"I don't think I can."

"Well, that's convenient."

"I mean, I think I have to go now."

"Yeah, wait here and I'll see you when I get out of the hospital. If they don't put me in jail or the loony bin."

"No, I mean…I think I have to go."

Steve looked up sharply and the light around Tony nearly blinded him. Tony shone golden in the night, but it did not so much as glint off the water. The glow began to spread until it looked like a doorway, and beyond it Steve could make out a countless throng of people, a great outpouring of love and warmth that waited to welcome Tony home. Tears ran down his face before he even knew it. He felt Bucky's hand on his shoulder and saw him smile one last time before he passed through the doorway and a great weight slipped off Steve's soul, but Tony lingered.

"They're waiting for you," Steve managed to choke out. The light made him want to weep but he never wanted it to stop at the same time. He could feel Bucky there now, and his mother, and his lost friends, but he knew he couldn't go there. Not yet.

"Pepper always gave me crap about being late to everything," Tony said. "I don't want to go. I want to stay here. With you."

"I want that too," Steve said. "But I can't be that selfish."

"It's not fair," Tony said. "I want to be alive. I want a life to spend with you. We should be together."

"I'll be along," Steve chuckled through his tears. "Will you be waiting?"

"Always. I'll be with you always, even if you can't see me. I just wish…I know you so well, but I've never gotten to touch you. How could I meet the person I was supposed to love after I died? I wasted so much time, Steve, I regret so many things…" Tony held his hand out, suffused with the golden glow of dawn.

"Let it go, Tony," Steve said. "Be at peace." Steve took Tony's hand. They touched for only a moment, but Tony's skin was warm and human against his own. The light spread through Steve and took his pain away and in a heartbeat he saw all the days they would never spend together overlaid with a profound feeling of acceptance.

"Take care of yourself," Tony chided. "And if you would do one thing for me?"

"Anything," Steve promised.

"Take care of Thor and Rhodey too. All of you have been lonely too long."

"I will," he promised.

"Have a good life," Tony said. The light shone through him so brightly he was little more than an outline, only his beautiful eyes and his smile still clear for Steve. "I'll see you later."

"Later," Steve said. Tony faded into the doorway and it began to close behind him. "I love you," Steve called. The doorway narrowed to a bright sliver and winked shut.

"Fuck," Steve muttered. He slumped back onto the deck. He hoped Tony had heard him. Tony deserved to have those be the last words he heard. Steve buried his face in his elbow and lay face down on the splintery wood, blocking out the sight of the moon and the trees sighing in the wind. He would never see Tony again, at least not in this life, and at the moment he didn't want to see anything else either. He choked on a sob but the tears came in a hot gush. He cried for all he had lost and the beauty he had seen only briefly, and he was still there, clinging to the fading warmth of a spirit's love, when Rhodey showed up with the police.

"Steve?" he said. "You dead?"

"No, not dead," Steve said. He took a deep, shaking breath and pushed himself to sit up.

"Did you get shot too?"

"No. Dragged through the woods, almost stabbed, and zapped with the paralyzer, but not shot. Thor, though, he needs help. He's still at the mansion."

"I know. We found him already. EMTs are working on him."

"Oh thank god. I thought he might be dead, and Tony would be so pissed. How is he?"

"Not good, if I'm honest. He lost too much blood and it's a long way to a hospital. Can you stand up?"

"Nope. Not even going to try. My knee is toast. Maybe for good this time," he admitted.

"I have to ask, are you armed?"

"It's safe."

"OK," Rhodey said. He came closer to Steve and helped him roll over and sit up with minimal jostling. His body was losing the warmth Tony had left him rapidly, and it was starting to remember how to hurt. Rhodey wrapped a blanket around him and spoke into a radio. "Ambulance left with Thor, but another is coming for you. Joshua is DOA, not that I'll be crying myself to sleep over that son of a bitch. Steve, what the hell happened up here tonight?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Steve said. A great wash of weariness flooded through him and he scrubbed at his face, caked with blood, dirt, and tears.

"Try me. I got a corpse up there that drowned in the middle of the floor, a friend who's been shot but no gun, and a missing billionaire. Any more corpses around here I should know about?"

"Two. Thor and I…found Pepper Potts. In the lake."

"Shit," Rhodey said. He slumped next to Steve and covered his eyes as another, last bit of hope died within him.

"Stane fell in there, too, but I don't know that you will find a body. Not any time soon."

"Jesus. Did Tony do that?"

"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts, Honey Bear."

"I don't but…What did you call me?"

"Tony says don't scratch the paint, whatever that means. And no, he didn't kill anybody. How did you know to come up here?"

"I got a call," Rhodey said. "From Thor's number. At first I thought it was a drunk dial or something- he's done that a few times- but then I could hear Stane talking and I don't know what all. A gunshot. And this voice said 'It's happening again. Help me, Rhodey.' and then it went dead." Rhodey stared ahead, out over the water. "I know that voice. I'd know it anywhere. If a dead man calls you, you come. So here I am. Hopefully in time. You're right, if Thor dies, Tony will be pissed."

"You were right," Steve said. "About all of it. He never relapsed and he never committed suicide. Joshua murdered him. Paralyzed him and dumped him in the lake. He left a fake note but Thor destroyed it. Stane stole his work. He'd been stealing from the Starks for years, but Tony was starting to get wise and Stane couldn't keep him distracted anymore. Some of it was in code though, and that's what he was trying to get Thor and me to give him."

"What was in it? Evidence?" Rhodey asked, his eyes going sharp as he again caught the scent of his obsession.

"I doubt we'll ever know. Tony destroyed it." He gestured out over the lake and Rhodey sighed.

"He never liked to make things easy for me," Rhodey said. "Well, this should at least be enough to reopen the investigation. Who knows what we'll find if Stane's not around to obstruct everything and murder the witnesses."

"Be careful," Steve said. “Stane can't have been in it alone, and Tony wanted me to take care of you."

"Is that right? When do you start?"


	7. Chapter 7

Rhodey brought him drawing supplies in the hospital, and Steve spent the next few days sketching Tony's face. He watched the news in the evening to catch the press updates on the investigation, and Rhodey looked more alive than Steve had ever seen him, animated by the will to clear his friend's name at last. Steve wondered what sort of life he would live once he had finished. He went back to his drawing, one he'd seen in Tony's memories, of him laughing with Rhodey. He hated to show them to anyone else, but he thought he might offer this one as a gift. Each drawing he finished felt somewhat final, as though he'd exorcised something from himself that didn't really belong there and yet would miss. Someone tapped lightly at his door and a nurse he'd seen a few times before stuck her head in. Steve hid the unfinished drawing as nonchalantly as possible inside the sketchbook and gestured for her to come in.

"Hey," she smiled. "You were asking about another patient, right?"

"Thor. Thor Odinson. Did he make it through the surgery? Can I see him yet?"

"Yes, he did, and yes, you can. Only for a few minutes, though. He isn't awake yet but he should be soon. I wanted to take you when he could talk, but they'll be here to take you to pre op soon. How's the knee?"

"It's still under there," he said. The less he thought about it, the better. Rhodey told him the surgeon who was flying in to do the surgery was the best in the country, but he couldn't stop thinking that he'd never walk properly again. They wouldn't let him eat, but it hardly mattered; he was too nervous to be hungry anyway.

She wheeled him through the hospital; he couldn't even have a chair, because he couldn't bend the knee at all, so he went on a cot. The wing they entered was hushed and grave, with few sounds beyond soft murmuring voices and the beep and hiss of monitors and respirators. The nurse took him into a room where Thor lay, pale and bandaged and hooked to several machines, but breathing without a tube. A tall, thin man with dark hair rose to meet him, rising stiffly from a hard chair in the room. He looked nothing like Thor, with long, sharp features and a feline grace, but something in the way he held himself told him this was Thor's brother before he even spoke.

"Captain Rogers is here for his visit, Mr. Odinson," she said.

"I still don't think this is such a good idea," he said, and he spoke like Thor, with the perfectly accentless English of an expensive education. "My brother is in a fragile state, he hasn't yet woken, and this man was involved in the unpleasantness."

"Thor's my friend," Steve said. "Are you Loki? He told me about you."

"Really."

"He said you were never going to see him again."

"I'll just be outside," the nurse said. "Remember, just a few minutes, and I'll be back."

"It's true, my father did enforce the family estrangement in the past, but that wasn't my idea. Thor could have come back, but I hadn't heard from him."

"So what are you doing here?"

"I received a phone call and I got on a plane."

"The hospital found you easy enough then. Or did Rhodey call you?" Loki gave him a sharp, unreadable look.

"It came from a number I hadn't seen in years. Tony Stark's number. I'm not as clear as I'd like to be on the timeline, but I believe it came only seconds after the shooting. He told me to get my head out of my ass and come to America because Thor needed me. When a dead man summons me, I believe it."

"He was a busy ghost," Steve sighed. "Did you find that strange at all?"

"Please, that word reeks of theatrics. Call him a spirit. It was one of my more memorable experiences. But I'm a believer, Captain Rogers, and for all his faults, Tony Stark was undeniably fond of my brother. He was also privy to the little-known information that Thor and I share the same rare and exotic blood type. If I had not arrived when I did to provide a transfusion, things would be far worse. I might have arrived only to bury him, instead of waiting interminably for him to wake up while the vampires on the medical staff try to figure out how much they can get away with taking from my veins." He looked down his long nose at Thor's sleeping form, and though his words were cold, he leaned close to his brother, watching for any sign of him waking, and Steve thought he was tense with worry and impatience. Loki seemed a man who hated to be still and the room was like a sterile prison for him, but he did not want to leave Thor to wake alone. He looked stiff, pale and weary from days spent here, donating the blood Thor needed to recover.

"Do you want to get some coffee? Food? Something? I'm not good for much, but I can sit with him." Loki drew his breath to refuse, shaking his head, but then took stock of his stiff spine and dishevelled clothes and thought better of it.

"Very well. A few moments to clean up and try to find something edible in this barren place. My thanks. You are a friend of his?"

"That's right." Loki stood and stretched as discretely as possible, but he looked Steve over thoroughly.

"I have questions for you," he said. "About what befell my brother. And Stark, I suppose."

"I might have the answers," Steve shrugged. Loki's eyes narrowed.

"They will be like a gentle warm up compared to tomorrow," he warned.

"What's tomorrow?"

"Our mother will arrive." Loki looked back over his shoulder at Thor, drinking every detail in with his eyes to reassure himself before he swept out of the room. Steve wasn't sure what to do, but he leaned over the railing of his cot far enough to touch Thor's hand. After another moment, Thor cracked one eye open, then looked over to Steve.

"Is he gone?" Thor asked.

"For the moment," Steve said. "How long have you been awake?"

"I truly do not know," Thor said. "It is like an awful dream, since the lake."

"Avoiding your brother?"

"I do not know what to say to him," Thor said. He didn't have enough blood left to blush properly, but he did turn his head sheepishly, as though his hair would cover his face.

"Try 'hello' and see where it gets you," Steve said.

"He's lying, you know," Thor said. "I heard him earlier. He's been badgering anyone he can corner to take more blood for me, but they keep turning him down."

"Some people can't say 'I love you'," Steve told him.

"I can hardly believe he's here."

"Tony called him," Steve said.

"But he… He actually came," Thor said.

"Don't be so surprised. You would do the same, wouldn't you? After all this time, if somebody called you and said your brother was in trouble, would you go?"

"Of course," Thor admitted.

"I know you would. Tony knew too. Do you remember Tony?" he asked gently. Thor had seen him only briefly and he'd been bleeding to death at the time.

"I thought I dreamed it," Thor said. He shut his eyes and his face grew even paler. Steve's time was running out.

"It was real," Steve promised. Thor sighed and shifted slightly, trying to move without jostling his injured arm. His eyes snapped open and he tried to sit up as much as he could, looking Steve over. A monitor began to beep more intensely.

"What about you? You were injured as well. Your leg…"

"I'm all right," Steve said. "I have a surgery soon to work on it."

"Will it…work?" Thor asked.

"I don't know," Steve admitted. "No one wanted to promise anything. It might go back how it was. It might be better than it was. Or it might not ever be even that good again."

"I'm sorry," Thor said. "Truly."

"Hey I'm doing better than you are," Steve said. "You should probably be dead."

"Yes. I have Tony to thank for my continued life, it would seem." Thor's voice was soft, but Steve could still hear the ambivalence in it.

"I'm glad you're alive," Steve said. He gripped Thor's hand tighter. It seemed like something he needed to hear. "I don't have so many friends around that I can afford to lose one. I don't know what I'm going to do now, but Tony wanted us alive and we're going to have to do it together."

"Do you want a job?" Thor asked. "I'm going to be out of commission for a while and I could use the help around the brewery. Beer is life, my people say."

"You aren't going home?"

"This is my home. Glad though I am to see my brother, he makes a poor nurse and he lacks the patience for brewing. Whatever life he has in our home country, I won't try to reinsert myself."

"That sounds good," Steve said. It did sound good. Thor alone had an idea what had happened at Stark's Pond. He didn't think Steve was crazy. He'd described brewing as a quiet, creative endeavor, and Steve would have lots of time to paint.

"I will ask Loki to sneak us some so we can drink on it. Seals the contract," Thor winked.

"I'm sure I could sneak whatever you want, but I have no intention of doing so," Loki drawled from the doorway. Thor's eyes went wide and he froze. "I see you woke up for him," Loki continued. He affected to be insulted to cover his obvious relief taking two steps into the room and setting down a cardboard container of something that had left grease spots. The two brothers remained an awkward distance apart, one standing, one lying in bed, both pale and beaten.

"Hello, Loki," Thor whispered. "You look well." Loki drew a breath, but his tongue was still. Thor surged forward, trying to sit up and reach for him. Monitors beeped strident warnings and Loki came unrooted.

"You look like shit, you fool. You FOOL," he said. He leaned over so Thor would lie back down and let Thor hug him. If a tear of two fell onto Thor's chest, neither of them acknowledged it. "You and the old man both, wasting so much time until it was nearly too late! What were you thinking?"

"I'm sorry, brother," Thor murmured. He was clearly about to lose consciousness again, but he seemed determined to hold on to Loki no matter how strange the position was. The nurse returned then and they each held a finger up to their lips and grinned. She wheeled him out quietly as Loki began to chastise Thor in earnest in their own tongue. He stroked Thor's hair as he did it, and Thor lay at peace, smiling all the while.

It was hard to be alone in the hospital, especially when he was supposed to go to surgery in less than an hour, but they gave him a few minutes. Steve took out his sketchbook and opened to the very first page, the first sketch he'd done after he woke up. He'd been loose with the painkillers and all of it had hurt so much, not knowing about Thor, Pepper dead, the police baffled and looking to him for sane answers, and he'd drawn the only thing in the world he wanted to see. Tony smiled at him from the page, not the playboy act but his real smile, the one Steve had seen when he stood in the doorway. Now he found it comforting to look at it, hold it in his hands, and speak to it.

"You said you'd be looking out for me," he said. "Does that mean you can hear me? Or am I talking to myself? There are worse things, I guess. They buried Pepper today. I couldn't go, but Rhodey said it was nice. Subdued. She… There weren't a lot of people left who remembered her, but a lot of people came because they knew you. That sounds bad, but it was more in your honor. Rhodey's been all over, telling people what happened to you. The board of Stark Industries is in damage control mode and I don't blame them. He's out for blood and he's convinced at least some of them knew, or should have known, what was going on. I tried to tell him you wouldn't care anymore, that you wanted him to move on to something else, but it's important to him."

"Thor made it through all the surgeries. I guess you knew he would. That was nice, sending his brother to him. He needed that, and not just for the transfusions. But you knew that too." He thought he might start to cry again. He'd gone so long without it that now he'd done it once it seemed to come more naturally.

"I miss you so much. Christ, Tony, I wish you were here. Even ghost here. My leg…Well, like I told Thor, no one is making me any promises. They don't think it has to be amputated, but they might have to fuse the joint, or replace it. I'm scared." He forced himself to loosen his grip because he was wrinkling the paper. "But you know what? I'm OK now. I still miss Bucky. I always will. And you. And I don't want to deal with the pain and the therapy and walking with a cane for the rest of my life. But I'm OK. I don't know what I'm going to do without you, but I had better have something to tell you when I see you again. I hope you don't mind me talking to you. I have to go now, but I hope I'll be around later." He sighed and ran his fingers over the paper once more before he closed the book and put it away. They came and took him to another round of meetings and consults with the doctors.

The cold bite of the anaesthetic gave way to bright, warm light. Tony took his hand and cupped his face.

"You're here," Steve breathed. "Am I dead?"

"No," Tony said. "Not for a long while yet. I had to see you."

"Is this a dream?"

"Maybe," Tony nodded. "Doesn't mean it's not real."

"You stole that from Harry Potter," Steve said, and Tony laughed.

"Yes I did. It's a good line."

"Can you stay?"

"For a while. I'll be around to see you, when I can. If you like," he said.

"I miss you," Steve said. He fell into Tony's arms and dream or not, they were warm and inviting. "I love you. I didn't get to say it back."

"I love you too. It comes through."

"Hey, I can stand up?"

"Here we can do anything. You ready for that dance?"

"Why me? Why not Thor? Or Rhodey?"

"I love them too," Tony said, and here he looked sad, as sad as a man in heaven could look. "But they can't see me. You're the special one. We're connected."

"That's from a movie too, but I can't remember which one."

"You can't call me on that every time or I won't be able to talk at all," Tony said.

"We can talk later. For now, you owe me a dance."

He and Tony swayed together in the golden light and he was as solid as a dream. They kissed and Tony whispered to him, sweet and insubstantial words that passed directly into his mind and formed their music. He would wake up, he knew, but he would have this. Until it was time to go home forever.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> If you love the 1990 classic film Ghost, starring PatrickSwayze/Whoopi Goldberg/Demi Moore, the way that I love the 1990 classic film Ghost, then I hope you enjoyed the many shoutouts to it. Remember, it's not a ripoff, it's an homage. Seriously I've seen that movie so many times.


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